Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Worst Games of 2010!

This list is going to be a little unorthodox, because I just didn’t play that many bad games in 2010. Most of the games I played I really enjoyed, and the ones that didn’t look great weren’t experiences I thought to invest myself in. 2010, even though it didn’t seem it at the time, was really a red letter year for gaming, and it’s great to look back on the catalog of titles that have fallen into my lap over the last year and see so many worth playing. But they can’t all be winners, and these games, not all of them altogether bad, are the ones that made everything else look good in 2010.

Best Game That I Forgot I Played and Am Now Sort of Angry At In Retrospect of 2010 – Supreme Commander 2

This game occupied my life for multiple weeks. It was great, because I could completely disengage myself from it while I played through the single player campaign and, since I’m a gamer who works a full time job while writing shit no one reads and playing as much as I can, that gave me some much needed time to catch up on my TV. Thanks to Supreme Commander 2 I now know most of Parks and Recreation by heart and managed to see an entire season of 30 Rock as it came out. This is a luxury few games afford me. Thank you, Supreme Commander 2!

But as a game, more specifically a single player game, Supreme Commander 2 kind of failed me. It didn’t fail me because it was bad per sec, although it had a lot of problems. Nor did it fail me because it was somehow poorly designed. Quite the contrary, Supreme Commander 2 was the best iteration of a set of design principles first put in place with the original Total Annihilation, and Sup Com 2 kind of made those principles, for the first time, into a complete polished product. Each of the sides had personality and intellect, even though they were more or less symmetrical, and the game was always smooth, no matter what was going on.

My only complaint is that, after completing the single player campaign and watching a mostly forgettable ending which could have been great if it wasn’t for the last few seconds of it, I never really thought about Supreme Commander 2 again.

The best games, the best books and movies and comics and everything else stay with you long after you’ve let them go. That crazy ex you hate? You remember her because the sex you had was incredible, or because you felt something fantastic for her. That discomfort you felt reading Grendel is part of what makes it a good book, part of what keeps it with you. Part of the ephemeral thing that makes great art great is its personal resonance, its ability to sustain itself within your mind. Supreme Commander 2 could not have failed more thoroughly on this count

The game, for all its polish and design, sort of leaves me with the vague impression that I was a kid playing with toys for a few days. And, in retrospect, that’s really all it was. Faceless armies of units clashing against one another, differentiated by design and color, but aside from that as blah as blah could blah. Supreme Commander 2 was a fine game in every respect, except the one that really counted: it didn’t make any sort of impression on me, and for that it ends up on this list, an otherwise totally competent game that somehow just didn’t work.

Poorest Overall PC Port of 2010 – Burn Zombie Burn

On the other end of the spectrum, Burn Zombie Burn is a game rife with personality. It taps into our recognition of popular culture, our love of zombies and mowing them down and our love of Bruce Campbell. It was a twin stick shooter, one of the first and possibly best genres of games and it could have and should have been great when it finally came to PC with all its multiplayer, customization and documentation friendly bits and pieces.

But when you really examine it Burn Zombie Burn is little more than just its personality. It is one of the rare games that, somehow, became less than the sum of its parts through the incompetent choices that were made porting it over. I’ve read reviews of this game for PS3 and they seem to be about another product altogether, something magical and fun and easy to use. For me, however this game has so far been nothing but a chore. I haven’t put a lot of time into it, only a handful of hours, but whenever I sit down I find myself dealing with muddy controls, poorly configured and completely uncustomizeable. I find myself swearing at my monitor, wishing that I had any idea, really, what was going on, how to throw dynamite, or that I could have some hints or tips on just how to get a little further.

It could be that this game will transform into some incredible de-stresser in my life, that I’ll come to know and love it in some profound new way, but it’s hard to see that coming right now. It’s hard to even write a lot about, just because there’s so little to it. You run in circles, occasionally lighting zombies on fire. Then you shoot zombies and, if you’ve lit enough of them on fire, you get points. But there are useless items, sloppy controls and poorly parceled out weapons and powerups, all of which get in the way of what could’ve been an awesome, awesome game based on the safest, simplest concept ever. And when I look at it, it’s pretty clear that it’s a problem with the designer looking at the PC and having no clue just how to build a game for the oldest, and perhaps most universal platform. The end result is a game that makes me angry for wanting to like it and that makes playing it seem like a chore.

Most Tentatively Disappointing Game of 2010 – Amnesia: The Dark Descent

This is undecided, because I’m still trying to like Amnesia right now, but it’s not helping me. This is a problem that F.E.A.R. 2 had for me last year as well, although F.E.A.R. 2 had a very competent shooter padded around it to make the product seem a little more edible by comparison. Amnesia doesn’t get what it means to be a horror game.

When I think of horror games the first and best one that really comes to mind isn’t one that is conventionally considered a horror game. It’s the original Thief. Thief introduced you to a strong, smart protagonist with a history. He was competent, stealthy, although he couldn’t always stand up in a fight, and he could handle anything that society could throw at him. Guards with swords, guards with arrows, he had toys to deal with the worst of them and darned if he was going to get caught off guard and end up in a shallow grave or a prison because of them.

Thief bucked all this when it lead you into new areas with new enemies, powerful enemies that you could fight, with the right tools, but against whom a single mistake would be fatal. Burricks, ghosts and, on some occasions, super-powered religious zealots, all made for an unforgiving which was legitimately scary and provoked both a transformative reaction from the character as well as the player. And the reason it worked was because you were introduced to the dangers of the game as being real, tangible things – your ability to evade them was likewise quite real, and their ability to find you and murder you was based on your own ability to conceal yourself. There were no moments when control was taken away from you unbidden, no moments where you were unexpectedly put in a spot where you were weaker than you should have been to make you afraid. You had the tools to get out of real, dangerous situations and you could deal with them if you kept your head and worked it out.

But if you fucked up, if you lost your cool or if you didn’t think on your feet Thief would not forgive you. Thief would destroy you completely, and rightly so. It was a legitimately scary experience and it didn’t let you make excuses for yourself. The whole series pulled this off perfectly, and perhaps the single most profound horror experience I’ve ever had in a game remains the Shalebridge Cradle, which took the Thief horror model and realized it better than ever before by messing with your perception in a completely understandable and fair way while putting you in terrible danger. But it never did anything that was cheap, and it never went out of its way to scare you. Whenever you felt you were in danger it’s because you really were – hence horror functioning perfectly. The threat was always real, and the game wanted you to know that.

Amnesia, at least so far, has none of that. As far as I can tell I can’t even fight enemies. I might be able to throw things at them. And I can occasionally light candles to stave off madness, because when I sit in the dark my camera starts turning in circles and I feel a little nauseous. Also, five minutes into the game it has taken camera control away no fewer than three times and altered my motion controls while a scary sound played about as many.

Attention game developers: none of this shit is scary. It’s scary like having something jump out at you from a corner or having an enemy you can’t fight jump around at you randomly. It’s actually just quite annoying. It’s lazy, it’s a camera trick movies play with to try and scare people when they don’t have strong actors or a solid cinematographer. Amnesia has embodied this annoying lack of competence to a T so far in its lazy attempts to scare me. What makes it even worse is just how much accolade it has received to date. I have no idea why so many people loved Amnesia so dearly, and I have no idea why it even exists as a game. It could be that I’ll have to do something soon that will undermine my thoughts about the game, something that will invert the power structure and make for a challenging game that makes me feel like I’m in a situation where I’m evading and playing against real danger, but so far Amnesia: Dark Descent doesn’t even hint at knowing what it means to be a horror game.

Worst Execution of a Simple Fucking Game in 2010 – Puzzle Agent

Twin Peaks was one of the most critically recognized and acclaimed shows ever. Puzzle games are fucking sweet, and funny self-aware puzzle games have never had a higher stock than they have today. Combining the two seems like the simplest, best idea you could ever have. Somehow Puzzle Agent managed to fuck this all up.

The funny part is that they didn’t do it with their story, or their puzzles, although those both have problems. A weird story is acceptable, if something you can and should criticize, in a Twin Peaks style narrative. And puzzles with problems are fine as long as you have a robust hint system and take the time to actually explain how the puzzle is supposed to work in the context of your game. These are just issues that you can correct by carefully describing just what you want in a solution or by telling your weird story well.

Puzzle Agent does neither of these things. At best it accomplishes most of its goals in storytelling. But by the end of the game it doesn’t give enough, isn’t weird or funny enough and doesn’t seem concerned enough with actually making you feel like you got anything out of solving all those fucking puzzles. And the way it describes and hints at its puzzles, the one thing that should have been easy enough for its designers to accomplish, is completely incompetent in its execution. If Puzzle Agent took the time to make sure that its players knew just what the fuck they wanted in a solution each time they introduced a new kind of puzzle then it wouldn’t be an issue.

But it’s rare that they ever will. There are a handful of occasions where the directions for a puzzle are clear, and fewer occasions still when the hints are actually helpful and articulately rendered. Mostly they’re just frustrating tidbits intended to goad you towards a solution that are almost never helpful. A hint is supposed to elucidate something about the puzzle, not provide a partial solution or taunt you for being too stupid to figure it out on your own. This is exactly what the hints in Puzzle Agent do, however. At best they show you an incomplete solution and ask you to fill in the blanks. At worst they scoff at you and dismiss you by offering up information that should have been in the directions for the god damn puzzle in the first place.

Puzzle Agent is from a good designer. It’s a good, simple concept, and there’s no reason for it to be as slipshod and shitty as it is, but it remains one of the most disappointing games I played this year despite my going into it with nearly no expectations. It’s a testament to the power of puzzle games, however, that I stuck it out to the end. Telltale might be bad at explaining puzzles or doling out their own stories, but they’re great at actually making the meat of a puzzle game – the puzzling.

Most Interminably Long Game That I Still Will One Day Beat of 2010 – Final Fantasy XIII

I’m a huge Final Fantasy fan. I even liked XII, which everyone who liked Final Fantasy hated with a passion. I thought it was a neat new take on the whole system and that it deserved some love for trying as hard as it did.

XIII had none of the trappings that really make Final Fantasy great, however. The best Final Fantasy games are the ones with a real sense of place within them, with fully fleshed out areas and towns you can explore, cultures that are present within the game. VII is the best example of this, where most of the real action occurs in cities and towns and the world map, the random battles and the hum-drum dungeons don’t even appear until around eight hours into the game. XIII is the opposite of VII. It has no towns, no cities, no shops. You shop through a floating ATM which inexplicably appears in random locations throughout the game world. You play with the same set of characters, none of whom you really get a chance to care about, and by the time the world really opens up as an adventure narrative you’re almost twenty hours into the game.

And unlike the beautiful unfolding of the world that most Final Fantasies manage when they start to open up, like the way Final Fantasy III lets you explore most of the world after experiencing those parallel narratives or the way that IX lets you take over the first chance it really gets, Final Fantasy XIII never really changes. You’re always doing more or less the same thing, letting your battles run on autopilot, at best giving all but one of your characters very general directions in how they should fight.

The end result is a story light, grind heavy product that I’ve sunk near a hundred hours into at this point and still haven’t beaten. Twenty of those, to be fair, were spent in the sprawling proto-end game that Final Fantasy XIII offers, which is without a doubt its best feature, but many were spent in an interminable slog between points of interest, fighting reskins of the same old baddies and wishing that something would change just so I could feel like I’d accomplished something. Even acquiring new powers lack the oomph it normally has in Final Fantasy games, and acquiring the ultimate weapons for your characters, which is traditionally the product of a long quest-like process of exploration, is mitigated to grinding for money in XIII.

It’s as if they removed the fantasy from Final Fantasy, stripped out the magic of discovery from a game where that truly is, more or less, its single finest feature. The end result is a game that feels like a chore. Even advancing, discovering new parts of the story, kinda feels like work. Exploring a series of geometric shapes that are supposed to make up a dramatic late-game map isn’t really much fun when all of the other phases of the game have more or less consisted of such settings with slightly less transparent graphic renderings.

That said, the only regret I have for Final Fantasy XIII really, in my heart of hearts, is that I haven’t beaten it yet. It’s still a part of my life, and with as much time as I’ve sunk into it I’m going to have to beat it sooner or later. I just can’t imagine that the ending will actually be anywhere near enough to justify the time I’ve sunk into the game itself.

The Game That More Than Any Other in 2010 Has No Excuse For Being This Poorly Made – Call of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the worst game of 2010. It’s also one of the best games of 2010. Bear with me for a second here.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is perhaps the single best refinement of the shooter model that was introduced with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. You kill enemies to earn enduring experience points and then use those points to buy weapons and create your own classes. The weapons are all useful, they all have personality, and they all feel different. Black Ops does way better with this concept than Modern Warfare 2, and it does it without crowding the game with bullshit the way MW2 did or removing shooter components the way MW2 did or cutting out dedicated servers the way MW2 did. It keeps the root of the game alive, adds a neat little zombie mode in there too and overall it’s just a great, fun game to play.

Unless you’re talking about it from a performance perspective. From a performance angle Black Ops is a nightmare. As a multiplayer game it’s plagued with issues related to lag, optimization and generally just working as a PC game. Playing it when things are working just right is a divine experience, well worth the retarded sixty dollar entry price which will always be the cost that Activision charges us because Bobby Kotick does not negotiate with enemies and we are most certainly his enemies as gamers. In keeping with this theme Kotick has lain a number of traps for us within Black Ops. The game will, without warning, become unplayable. Graphic settings that worked fine a few seconds earlier will, despite a lack of dramatic repopulation on screen, suddenly start choking themselves. Lag will beset you on a server with a 50 ping teleporting ballistic knife wielding fuckfaces will cut you up and down just to prove they can.

And these are just the technical issues besetting multiplayer. The single player game has all these tech problems AND has the misfortune to have Sam Worthington as its lead voice actor, doing a shittier job of voicing a video game lead than that guy who was on The Pretender back in the ninties (though to be fair, he was an excellent voice actor and, in retrospect, actually not too bad at acting compared to Sam Worthington). As if Worthington’s shitty voice acting wasn’t bad enough (Why does he still get work, by the way? Does anyone actually know?) the story itself is just poorly thought out and told. It revolves around a blah twist that vascilates between being pedestrian and tasteless and centers around levels so poorly designed that I can and have written an entire essay about just how shitty they were. To summarize that essay: unacceptably shitty.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the first Call of Duty I have not replayed. That said, I have never played any of Treyarch’s other entries into the series. Perhaps they’re all of this incredibly poor quality. It’s hard to believe, but as it stands I cannot imagine why I would ever pick up Call of Duty: Black Ops to play when I have so many titles breathing down my neck except, perhaps, to see if it was as bad as I really thought it was. It’s so bad it doesn’t even trigger my achievement-whoring instinct, and for that I confer upon it the mantle of Shittiest Game of 2010. Of course, parts of it get the mantle of Best of 2010, so take that as you will.