Some websites might tell you up front that they’re only offering up their humble opinions and that your choices for this list are just as valid as their own. None of that here at Digital Onanism. The following games are the greatest releases of the year, and if you don’t think so you can fall on a cock and die. Prepare to have your mind blown as you discover what was truly worth playing over the last twelve months:
10 – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
This might come as a bit of a surprise to recent readers, as I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last few weeks shitting all over Call of Duty. After all, it made a lot of mistakes and lost a lot of what made the first game so great. The pre-game and post-release hype from both Infinity Ward and gaming media in general didn’t help and make no mistake, if I was making a list of the biggest disappointments of the year this would be at the top.
So why, you ask, is it on this list?
Remember that ex who is completely crazy, horrible for you in every conceivable way, but you still spend time with her? In fact you pour it into her like her sole function is to take over your life until eventually nothing remains except crazy bitch dominating your life and your friends are all worried about the weight you’re gaining and the fact that they barely see you and they just don’t understand why you’re doing this to yourself. Here’s a secret: it’s because the sex was incredible. That’s sort of the deal with Call of Duty.
It’s as if your crazy ex has come back to town, crazier and less attractive with “tricks” the other men in her life have taught her that don’t work as well as she thinks they do and you’re going to sleep with her because the sex, even though it isn’t as good as it used to be, is still mind blowing. Even though the conversation is still dull and coordinating your schedules is a fucking nightmare you’re still seeing her for as long as she’s in town because sex with her is still more enjoyable than sex with any other available partner in your zip/post.
Sex in this case is an allegory for multiplayer.
9 – Halo: ODST
Most people didn’t really take to ODST, and it’s easy to see why. It’s Halo without the Master Chief, a shorter Halo without an epic story. It does its best to impart a sense of mortality and urgency to Halo, a sense of unpredictability to a world normally governed by strict scripts. Sure, it doesn’t go all in anything it attempts to do, but what it attempts is worthwhile.
Noir storytelling and open world FPSes are in short supply, and ODST is the best example of each that I had the opportunity to play in 2009. Sure, the softcore porn soundtrack was a little frustrating, and the map system had some issues which should’ve been resolved during testing, but all in all ODST showed a move away from Halo’s regenerating health and gung-ho run and gun play to a tenser, more grown up kind of game play.
The city of New Mombasa at night is a wonderful place to explore, and the end game, as traditional as it is, hits all the right notes. By taking you through locations you’ve already had to deal with and tying the city into the larger world of Halo 3 ODST makes the Halo world bigger the same way that I Love Bees did way back in 2004: it focuses your experience on a small cast of characters, a few specific places with real personalities.
Halo has always had a bit of problem making itself seem unique. Most of its elements seem a bit generic and derivative, to the point where you can list off hand the 80s action movies most of the art direction was taken from. But ODST gives players a cast of characters they can actually care about, assisted greatly by the skillful voice acting of a third of the cast of Firefly. It gives us a sympathetic guardian angel with a real sense of personality and pathos.
It gives us a world, filled with people, to play with. Sure, it’s not the most complicated game in the world or the smartest, but it takes one of gaming’s biggest franchises in a good direction, and it does it almost entirely by accident. It’s because of ODST that I’m interested in Reach at all, and that’s quite an accomplishment after Halo 3’s hype machine burned me out.
8 – Heroes of Newerth/League of Legends
I feel a little weird putting these two on this list. League was certainly released in 2009, but Heroes of Newerth is tougher to pin down. I’ve been playing it for hours and hours every week for quite a while now and I’m still not entirely sure how and when they plan to release it. But given their Facebook based system of account distribution and their willingness to sell you the game right now with the caveat that, like its progenitor, DotA, it is a bit broken, it’s fair to say that anyone who wants to can and has been playing HoN in the year of 2009.
And these games are very important in their own way. They’re both alterations on the formula that made DotA such a successful mod for Warcraft 3. They’re cheap, they run on almost anything and they fix many of the major issues that DotA had. They also acknowledge that DotA is, in fact, important. So much so that it warrants two games, one of which captures the importance of map control and one of which captures the importance of the interplay of heroes.
Sure, they’ve both got their own problems, and I’m much worse at both of them than I ever was at DotA, but it’s hard to be upset when they’re both free to play and both so lovingly crafted. They’re the best examples of indie strategy gaming to come out this year, everything that Demigod wanted to be and more. It would’ve been great to see Demigod emerge as a successful and intelligent reproduction of the gameplay of DotA, as well as an expansion of the ideas surrounding this gameplay, but it didn’t pan out. And if we couldn’t have an original, professionally crafted game about controlling a map with a single unit and a handful of friends I’m glad we had a pair of faithful reproductions which gave DotA players their own place to play. Even if both LoL and HoN seem a bit amateurish and derivative they’re incredibly fun games, and anyone who didn’t play them during 2009 has missed out big time.
7 – Borderlands
Borderlands represents visually how I felt about this year in gaming. Its barren setting is speckled with tiny bits of personality that have to be milked in order to get anything out of it. Also, these bits increase dramatically in frequency as you progress through the game, with a nice fat doldrum located between March and August. But to those willing to give it a shot, Borderlands had a lot to offer.
Now, just to be clear, I wouldn’t recommend it over the previous games on this list, not by a long shot. As derivative as all those previous titles were none of them are nearly as well-treaded as Borderlands. With a system of gunplay completely lacking in any sort of real personality and a system of gameplay that tried to mix Unreal with Diablo, it walked exclusively in places we’d been before. But what Borderlands attempted to do in these places, the original ideas it brought to bear and the unique, if oftentimes underplayed, art direction it tried to bring into blockbuster territory, was noble and worth celebrating.
Sure, it was terribly broken out of the box. Multiplayer was a colossal chore on the PC in a way that should be deeply embarrassing to everyone at Gearbox, and even without the connectivity issues there are so many serious problems with how this primarily multiplayer game works with multiple players that Randy Pitchford should be shaking his head and biting his lip.
But for a few minutes every once in a while Borderlands is a great place to let your brain vacation. It’s mindless, mostly story free fun with some nice visual punch. The story central characters are imbued with more personality than anything else a first person shooter offered up this year and the raw breadth of weapons and play styles available in a game that most people will never complete an entire playthrough of is both disheartening and encouraging.
Because Borderlands is an ambitious, intelligent stupid game. It’s a stupid game totally aware of what it’s doing and, as a result, it does some pretty impressive things with the stupid places it wants us to visit. It is, and I grimace as I write this, a lot like Howard Stern. It’s aggressively populist and fully aware of it, intentionally playing down how smart it is so that stupid people might pick it up, look at it and become a little smarter themselves.
So while Borderlands is missable there are worse things you can do if you have two or three tech savvy friends and a few hours each week free to game with them.
6 – Red Faction: Guerrilla
I’m not entirely sure how this game was made. I never played the first two Red Factions. In fact, I hadn’t heard of them until Guerilla was released. I mean, why should I care about derivative shooters that curtailed their own original features? Was there something noble in their inability to embrace their own attempts at “ground breaking technology?”
Who’s to say. I can state with confidence that you definitely didn’t need to play them in order to enjoy Red Faction: Guerilla. And if those two games are what it took to make a technological marvel like Red Faction: Guerilla, then so be it. Because this game is fucking incredible.
Sure, the story is purile and bereft of meaningful character development or, for that matter, characters. Many of the weapons have frustratingly small clip sizes considering the range and manner in which you engage most enemies, a good number of the vehicles feel identical and several of the items that the developers give you are completely worthless (such as the thermobaric rocket, a great concept which simply cannot be used in combat). In fact, if it wasn’t for the destructible nature of every building in RF:G I wouldn’t be able to suggest this game at all.
But what a difference it makes. Being able to take down buildings, learning how to do it quickly and properly without killing yourself and completing missions by using this remarkable system in completely unpredictable ways is an amazing rush. If Red Faction: Guerilla had had a more vibrant world, a better story, better weapons or better vehicles it might’ve sling-shotted up to the top three. But as it stands, with a world that’s “good enough” to showcase the game’s tech and a story that barely serves its purpose and doesn’t really accomplish anything on its own, Red Faction is a must play game that has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Even though there are plenty of things it does wrong the complete destructibility of all structures in it is such an amazing realization of the principles that games such as Fracture have been trying to introduce unsuccessfully that Red Faction deserves to be celebrated and studied by designers for years to come. It has taken the “do anything, go anywhere” pretense that games such as Grand Theft Auto have been trying to convince us they tout for years and taken it to its most complete iteration ever.
Sure, there are huge problems with it. But never before has a man with a sledgehammer made such an impact on the way games should be made simply by tearing an entire world apart. If you haven’t played Red Faction: Guerilla yet I suggest logging on Steam and grabbing a copy before their holiday sales end some time later today. It’s well worth the wadded twenties it’ll cost you, and it will completely change the way you see both games and the worlds that they construct around us.
5 – Plants vs. Zombies
Had the end of 2009 seen anything less than the stellar series of releases it did this game would’ve remained in my number three position for the year. As it stands it’s a testament to the quality of the games to come that Plants vs. Zombies was supplanted all the way back to five, because this game was amazing in every way.
As a tower defense game it hits all the right notes, with all the great art direction and iterative gameplay we’ve come to expect from Popcap over the last decade or so wrapped up in a mechanically excellent balance of defenses and critters intent on ruining them. But there have been other mechanically sound tower defense releases in the past, so what makes Plants vs. Zombies so special?
The answer is what so many games, tower defense games especially, lack in general: personality. PvZ is jam packed full of personality. I’m not talking about the cute little text blurb telling you absolutely nothing about each unit. I’m talking about the expression on the face of your tallnut as he’s mauled by a zombie. The look of surprise on the severed head of a newspaper zombie as his body topples forward. I’m talking about the arc of the melons, the flash of the frozen toadstool, the cloud of the doom shroom and the roar of the cob cannons.
Plants vs. Zombies takes a simple and engrossing idea and gives it a nice and spiffy splash of paint which makes it more than just a fun way to waste time: it makes it a dangerous distraction from other games, a program running whenever a film is on “just because.” My Steam profile informs me that I’ve spent an embarrassingly large amount of time on my lawn, around 85 to be precise. Considering the fact that I spent ten American dollars on this game, that’s just absurd. That’s a ratio of 8.5 hours of fun per dollar, to those of you inclined to keep track of this shit, and I’ll still occasionally log on to try and blow off steam after a horrible week of dealing with shuffling morons who I can’t destroy with fruits and vegetables.
So Plants vs. Zombies has certainly earned its spot on this list, and indeed its spot on many other lists in the future. If you didn’t play Plants vs. Zombies during the last year you should be ashamed of yourself, and you should take advantage of Steam’s incredible set of sales and grab a copy right away. Popcap really outdid themselves this time, bursting out of my browser and right on to my Steam radar in a way that even Peggle didn’t managed to.
4 – Brutal Legend
It’s a statement on how bad at his job Bobby Kotick is that he didn’t believe this game would make money. That’s a bit harsh and unfair of me, actually. Bobby Kotick isn’t necessarily bad at his job, he just has no sense of what will and won’t sell to his company’s audience. I understand he’s actually quite good at managing Actvision/Vivendi as a company, and that they’ve made shameful profits during a recession and are well on their way to destroying all other competition in the publishing sector.
So maybe it’s more a statement on how incredibly good at defending artists EA has become that this game was made at all. Tim Shaffer’s latest opus, in more ways than one, must’ve been scary to someone who had an outsider’s perspective on gaming culture. An outlandish new setting, a style of gameplay most comparable to a failed RTS from the golden ages of PC gaming and a creative lead known for producing beautiful commercial flops has got to scare someone who’s supposed to deal exclusively with bottom lines, but Ricatello has earned a little nod of respect from me not just for giving Shaffer a new home at EA but for defending him when Activision attempted to bar the release of Brutal Legend.
Despite this rocky road to release, which would in most cases in 2009 overshadow the importance of the game itself, Brutal Legend made it into my X-Box and, more importantly, into my heart. There are pitifully few games that do such a skillful job at integrating players into their world and telling such a vibrant story with such memorable characters. Brutal Legend did one more by imbuing each of these memorable characters with a real arc, putting each of them to use in telling a story about love, isolation, redemption and finding your place in the world.
And it did so without ever seemingly like it was telling a big serious story. It did so while bringing zeppelins down from the sky and emo boys out of the earth. It did so while blasting Destroy the Orcs from a hot rod. It did so without compromising itself one bit. And that’s what makes it such an incredible landmark not only for gaming in general but for storytelling in 2009. It’s easy to write a missive about people changing because of cancer or war or famine. These are horrible things that force us to change, and while stories about them are important they’ve been around a while.
What’s much harder to do is introducing people to a new world and a new cast of characters and imparting a timeless message about self and other and understanding and love and isolation. If you can introduce to a world and a group of people we care deeply about that’s amazing enough, but to tell a story with these characters without a whiff of pretension as to the stakes of the story or the ridiculousness of this world where fire breathing pigs become weapons is an amazing accomplishment, no less of one than Steven Sherrill’s The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break or Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.
Without even discussing the original and at times almost too difficult gameplay that Brutal Legend offers up it belongs on this list solely because it told one of the best stories of 2009. It did so with candor and heart that people have trouble bringing to the most establish of mediums and it did so with massive barriers to its very existence. Along with number three it answered the question “can games be art?” with a resounding yes, one that was heard by a woefully small audience.
3 – The Path
Tale of Tales isn’t known for making accessible games. In fact many people would argue that what they create aren’t games at all. They’re exercises in frustration in many ways, like many great works of art. They don’t necessarily tell traditional stories, they require a great deal of effort and emotional investment out of their players and they’re often weird and unsettling, dealing with themes traditionally glossed over in mainstream gaming.
The Path is no exception. In a year obsessed with the blockbuster sequel, with releases like Killzone 2, Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2 and Halo: ODST making up the landscape, it was frightfully unique and significant. It was our little arthouse game that could, and while it hasn’t been discussed much of late it remains an important landmark in gaming.
I’m loath to discuss what The Path consists of in detail, because to do so is to spoil the exploration so key to the game itself. So I’ll offer a brief summary since I assume most people haven’t had a chance to experience it: The Path is a game about guiding young women to their Grandmother’s house through the woods, and breaking all the rules of conventional gaming and conventional storytelling. It’s a game about mortality, sexuality, maturity and innocence. It’s one of the most poignant things I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing and while it received some well deserved press at release it has since fallen by the wayside.
I would still recommend it without exception to anyone who reads novels or watches arthouse films. I recommend it to any women who play games and haven’t had a chance to play it yet, to anyone with a daughter or, hell, even with a child in general. I recommend it because it is a singular experience, one more worthy of discussion than most, and because the way it tells a story uses the medium of video games with chilling effectiveness.
I would also recommend it because it’s available for ten dollars on Steam. If you haven’t played The Path yet you really should.
2 – Dragon Age: Origins
Bioware made a game, and that means, Jade Empire aside, that the game is going to make it on to any top ten list I create. Games made by Bioware are almost always excellent, and certainly always warrant attention. But this time Bioware really outdid themselves: they made a game, a world and an engine for storytelling.
There are plenty of ostensibly “open world” games which are meant to offer the player a chance to tell their own story, but this story rarely reflects on the world. These games are almost always set in stark wastelands with a few exceptional characters that cannot be killed, characters necessary to whatever hackneyed story the developer decided he wanted to tell at the outset.
Dragon Age changes that. It likely won’t change it for everyone in the gaming business but it offers up an image of what gaming could be with a greater investment of time and effort. It allows players not only to shape their character’s history and background, it allows this background to shape the way the character perceives and interacts with the world. Many games offer facile choices about good and evil, but Dragon Age challenges players to actually inhabit the spaces it has constructed. It’s easy to turn your nose up at racist elves or isolationist dwarves, to maintain a noble conceit of “doing right” in Dragon Age’s world.
But it’s just as easy to sacrifice of yourself as both a player and a character in Dragon Age, to compromise to try and save lives. There are moments where a decision is clearly ridiculous, such as dousing the fountain of youth with acid to render it inert, but for every moment like that there are real choices to be made. Will you secure the testimony of slavers and, ergo, the throne for your ally? Or will you stick to your guns and sacrifice evidence to free the disenfranchised?
Even this decision remains facile compared to the story of Branka in the Deep Roads, a missive where every choice seems to be completely wrong and players are left to try and salvage what they can. Bioware could’ve phoned it in with Dragon Age, dumping us into a big world with a big story and letting the Marilyn Manson video they so erroneously attempted to sell us on play out. Instead they offered up a rich world filled with real people and gave us personal stories about vengeance, destiny and politics. They gave us a vibrant cast of characters which, with a few exceptions, had never seen the pages of fantasy before despite being desperately needed.
Like Fallout 3 last year, Dragon Age redefined what it meant to be an RPG. And like Fallout 3 it still had some problems, but it’s nigh impossible to care about them when the product delivered is such a remarkable slice of game. If you enjoy RPGs at all or have any interest in the way games tell stories Dragon Age is more than just an excellent game, it’s a sign of things to come as games mature as a medium.
1 – Warhammer 40,0000: Dawn of War 2
It seems a little odd to end my list on a game which most critics forgot about months ago. Who gives a shit, after all, about RTSes in a year so rich with action adventure titles and RPGs? Isn’t the Warhammer universe old hat by now? Isn’t this style of play tapped out by the Company of Heroes model? The answer to all of these questions is “fuck you” and it is curtly delivered by Dawn of War 2.
There are other RTSes that focus on territory control. There are other RTSes about controlling a small group of units, other RTSes with commander units that gain experience and reshape the armies they head. There are other fast paced, smart RTSes and there are other RTSes with persistent campaign maps that demand as much skill as planning. There are plenty of genre bending games, but there are none quite like Dawn of War 2.
Dawn of War 2 certainly has had its fair share of problems. Balance issues have plagued it since beta and the dramatic restructuring instituted by the subsequent patches intended to “fix” broken aspects of the game have transformed it into something unrecognizeable. But despite these changes Dawn of War 2 has a deft economy wherein each unit is useful in its own way, where the ability to skillfully use these units trumps any other facet of gameplay.
And it’s supported by its developers. The patches, as ham handed as they may be, are irrefutable evidence of that fact. They’ve offered up great swaths of new, free content which is incredibly compelling. It’s hard to not thoroughly enjoy The Last Stand, a sub-game which has given me substantially more joy than the single player campaign managed to (no slight to the enjoyable, if repetitive, single player game Dawn of War 2 includes). Paired with what is probably the best multiplayer action an RTS has offered up in recent memory (when it isn’t profoundly broken) Dawn of War 2 is more than worth its money, and while I do wince a little when I see that I’ve put over 250 hours into this game at present count it’s not difficult to justify. Dawn of War 2 is a remarkable game, the sort of game that people claim the industry is no longer concerned with creating.
It’s polished, artfully crafted and smart. It’s the consummate RTS, demanding both talent at planning and navigating its various systems quickly and skillfully. It has flaws, certainly, but remains a singular title this year in both what it attempts and accomplishes. The fact that its designers willingly recognize these flaws and work towards correcting them even as they prepare for a sequel further speaks to the quality of the game and the people who made it. Dawn of War 2 is far from perfect, but I’d still champion it as one of the most important games released this year, a fact evidenced by the nine months of sustained played I’ve enjoyed with it.
Some caveats to people with different lists: there are plenty of games I’ve missed. Technical issues have prevented me from playing Left4Dead 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2, games that almost certainly would’ve made this list or at least challenged seated titles for their spots. I also don’t own a Playstation 3, so Uncharted 3, Flower and the latest Ratchet and Clank never entered the running, though only the latter two really excited my interest. I also spent a great deal of time playing games released in previous years during 2009, an unfortunate reality forced on me by a combination of economic woes and the weakness of many titles that came out during the year. Still, that’s a whole other retrospective. For now, these are the best games I played last year which were actually released during the year. Feel free to post with your own if you like.
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