G-pinions

Ah, the glorious power of editing. I had a whole piece typed up yesterday on the year that was, but have decided it is junk. Second Sight caliber junk. The Emeril Show junk. So it's gone to the shadowy depths of junk hell where evil junk, such as the words I spat out yesterday, are sent for eternity to contemplate what they did wrong. If my words were of Hindu beliefs, they could one day be reborn, possibly finding their way into a pompous New Republic article or a Cosmo article about how food, sex and The Commish all go together. As my words neither lived nor died, though, they will simply be banned from this earth, never to be thought of again.

I have very little interest in taking part in a comprehensive Best of 2004 list. For starters, I haven't played some of the more prominent releases. So, while I will list the three titles I would most dread being forced, at gun point, to finish, do not consider it the final opinion of Tom. For instance, you can be sure that if I had played Metal Gear Solid 3, it would surely find a spot in my worst of list. It doesn't really matter though, because these games are boring and nothing could change that. Nothing! You hear me?

Just a note about this list: I didn't play any titles this year that could be considered "bad." Shockingly enough, I try to avoid the truly horrendous, for fear that, by some freak accident I may go blind or lose one or two appendages. If that happened, I would live in an eternal state of depression forever remembering some craptacular game as the last I was ever able to experience. Rather, my list contains games I thought beforehand would be fun and offered anything but. These are the three titles I would least like to play through in their entirety. The time I spent with them already is more than enough penance for any sin I have, or will ever, commit.

Number Three:

Killzone - I have a feeling that if I played the finished version of this game it would rank significantly higher, possibly even number one. My hopes weren't exactly through the roof with this title beforehand anyway. I generally enjoy any first person shooter, but my experiences with PlayStation (1 or 2) specific FPS titles were far less than satisfactory. It's an interesting circumstance, Sony has been on top of the console world for about a decade now, they have sold more games in that time period than McDonalds has sold burgers, they have a ton of good to very good games in every genre, including ones they invented like the rapping dog genre, and yet have not made one exclusive first person shooter worth owning. I have no idea how this has happened. Along with sports and maybe the all-encompassing "action" genre, FPS are probably the most popular titles around, in both mainstream and hardcore circles.

As low as my expectations were, I still had faith that Killzone would be fun. The reason? Sony purchased Guerilla Games months before Killzone came out. The reports said that Sony was so impressed by both the technology and gameplay of pre-release Killzone, they needed to secure that this and every subsequent Guerilla release would find it's way to Sony's world and no one else's. In hindsight, they would have been much better off buying Free Radical or just offering Microsoft a few boxes of donuts for Rare.

The biggest problem with Killzone that I encountered, and since I only played about ten minutes I can only guess it doesn't get worse than this, is the simple act of shooting. The very essence of FPS is the shooting. Whether the game revolves around story, multiplayer or espionage, the one thing a good FPS needs is making shooting fun. For a comparison, I didn't like the Takedown feature of Burnout 3. While fun for a while, it become tedious watching the crashes take place in slow motion every 30 seconds or so. But, the game remains fun because the actual driving in the game is fun. Whatever Killzone has going for it, and judging by reviews it isn't much, shooting is not one of the things.

Number Two:

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles - This game, unlike Killzone, carried high hopes with it. My high hopes. I am certainly not the biggest Square fan around, especially in the current generation of gaming, but they are still Square. They are more than aware how to make a fun title. The biggest problem people had with the game was also not a concern for me. I own a GBA, and my two friends who owned FF:CC also had GBAs. I figured any co-op RPG, a four player one especially, would be more fun than anyone should be allowed to have. Unfortunately, this game was anything but fun. It resides just below Brute Force on the All Time Bad Co-Op games list.

I would love to break it down to one or two elements that made the game such a drag, but seriously the whole experience was flawed. For one, there is far too much dying in the beginning of the game. Because of the ass-backwards way of divvying out magic, at the beginning of every dungeon your party is without any way to heal themselves. Furthermore, magic points are so limited in the beginning; you will only be able to heal a few times before your wand is completely dry. There were two parts of the game - one half was fighting in some of the most boring fights ever while the other half was watching your teammates fight in some of the most boring fights ever. And to make matters worse, you couldn't even get up to grab a soda while you were dead. You had to actually guide your dead ghost along the trails with the rest of your party even though the only control option given to you is the asinine ability to wave. What a travesty. I should have learned years ago, when two friends and I trudged through the gloomy world of Secret of Mana, that Square does not know how to make a great multiplayer RPG.

Number One:

Grand Theft Auto 3: San Andreas - I can feel the outrage right away. How could I put this, the all mighty GTA, as the worst game I played in 2004? Surely you weren't listening to what I said earlier. This is not the worst game I played, simply the one I would least like to play through. I used to love Grand Theft Auto. Andy and I came as close as any mortal man to actually getting 100% in Liberty City. I'm not sure how long we actually spent in pseudo-Philly, but considering we only took a breath to play Rampart when the mood struck us, it had to be around 100 hours, if not more. The story was very interesting, only the Sopranos can mess up a story about the Mafia. The graphics and control were primitive, but we didn't care. We could kill hookers.

But then Vice City came out. Andy and I were anxious to play through it, but after only a few days in Miami, we were bored. We picked up Liberty City again to pass a few more cab missions. Even though the game offered improvements, such as the ability to jump out of a moving car, the city layout was just confusing. The world of Liberty City felt like a real world. Vice City felt like a poorly constructed video game world. So, even with the slight improvements, we went back to the game we loved and never looked back.

Despite my bad experiences in the 80s, I was still looking forward to SA. While Nick was writing about how great the game was I got very excited, actually firing up Liberty City for the Xbox for the very first time just so I could get some hooker-killing relief. But then I went to Nick's and found a game that was even less fun that Vice City. The biggest "improvement" in the game now is a larger world. I don't understand why this is a good thing. If the new Brute Force took an hour to pass a single level, would it be better? What if the next Final Fantasy lasted 120 hours instead of the usual 60? Or if Madden '06 features a 200 yard field? Making something bigger usually just means it takes longer to do everything; there is no extra fun included.

So what I got was a game that controlled and looked like previous games, only much bigger and therefore much more boring. I only played the game about 10 hours total, though at various parts of the game so I have seen the beginning, middle and end. What I don't understand is why so many missions involve shooting. The worst part of the game is the shooting part. Anytime you have to get out of the car the game gets much, much worse. LC was so fun because not many missions required you to leave the car. Missions usually involved a race or running a car off the road or some other driving based objective. GTA:SA, which usually controls fairly average, gets into bad territory when you have to take out a gun. Usually a developer hides problems with their games, but Rockstar seemed to embrace it for some reason.

Also horrible is the airplane missions. Nick was defending the embarrassing controls even as he was crashing into the ground. I could see how having overly complicated flying mechanisms could be fun in a flight sim, but GTA:SA is an arcade game. Nothing in the game is realistic. Why not just make the planes fly more like Star Fox or, you know, some other game that controls well?

Anyway, I'm getting mad just thinking about this game again. Has anyone tried that co-op mode yet? This is one of the worse implementations of co-op I have ever seen. It would be number one on the list if it was a real co-op mode. Since you can't actually finish the game playing two player, though, it's just a horrible mess of an extra. You have to remain on the same screen together and only one of you is allowed to drive. Consider that the only good part of the game is driving and you have one of the most boring co-op modes ever. Off hand, I can't think of a worse one. Controlling Tails in Sonic 2 was always lame, but at least you got to watch Sonic run through the levels. And at least you had a semblance of control over Tails. If anyone can think of a worse two player co-op mode I'd like to hear. I am really drawing a blank.

I need to stop talking about this now. I'll be back with another post talking about the good games of the year. Until then, avoid these games like Ebola.

Halo 2 is so very close to having a perfect online game. Two things hold it back from flawlessness - a couple of games that show up on the large playlists way too frequently that suck ass (Assault on Coagulation, anything on Waterworks), and lousy, stinking, goddamn horrid CHEATERS. I just don't understand it. How the hell can you enjoy getting online every night, hooking up with your friends, and then spend several hours fucking people over by exploiting two lame glitches? The entire joy of the game comes from camaraderie, competition, and honing your skills, and cheating doesn't encompass any of those. These people all get their accounts banned eventually, so I can't even see getting an artificially high rank as much of a reason for such douchebaggery. It hasn't ruined the game by any means (after all, I do play several hours a night, four or so nights a week), but it can sour a good session of playing faster than a fork in the eye. I guess it bothers me as much as it does because it's so confounding; I can't even begin to imagine why people would ever do it. Jerks.

Because we're too small for EA to bother with, and because next-gen stuff is always cool:







I know this much: I'll have a much tougher time punching someone in the face with that life-like twinkle in their eye.