December 2010

Game of the Year 2010: Part One

December 21, 2010

Features / Opinion / by Graham Russell /

These are the shining examples of gameplay greatness this year, as decided by Snackbar Games staff. In this first installment, we look at portables and special categories.

Shawn Vermette: Dragon Quest IX is a great RPG that harks back to the good ol’ days of RPGs. It’s story is a little strange, but the gameplay is all classic turn-based JRPG. You only have one character that matters in DQIX, the rest are characters you can create on your own, or you can adventure around with three friends if you desire. In addition to the nostalgia factor, the party customization, and the classic turn-based combat, the sheer amount of content in DQIX is enough for it to be one of my best games of the year.

Graham Russell: I’m pretty sure this game doesn’t end. Designed for the compulsive tendencies of the Japanese hardcore gamer, DQIX has a wealth of post-game content and many advanced strategies and classes to pursue. (And unlike a game like Disgaea, it stays fun after the first hundred hours.)

Runner-up: Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

Chris Ingersoll: Seven years of dormancy (and thirty years of story progression) haven’t dulled the shine on Camelot’s handheld RPG series. The unique djinn mechanics and the use of psynergy to solve puzzles are just as fun as they were on the GBA the first two times, and it’s neat to see how the world has changed since the exploits of the original heroes, in a rare display of sequel continuity.

Mike Clark: Fast-paced action mixed with a RPG system featuring a main character who isn’t annoying like other RPG heroes and a game progression that’s tough but fun. Ys: The Oath in Felghana kept me going even through my anger at the tough bosses. It did have hard bosses but the way it did those bosses was right: not artificially difficult, just requiring the right strategy.

Runner-up: Valkyria Chronicles II

Graham Russell: Many have griped about the series’ move to the PSP (me included), but Valkyria Chronicles II was about as good as a game can be on the device. The segmented, recycled maps got a bit annoying after a while, but after all, these guys are fighting on their turf. They should know it well, right?

Graham Russell: Kairosoft’s little iPhone game certainly had an undeniable charm. Not only that, though, it’s hard to put down. While that may interfere with your ability to get things done, it’s a sign of a game with some tight design.

Runner-up: Rock Band Reloaded

Eric Schabel: Rock Band Reloaded is the series’ second outing on the iPhone and it only improves upon its predecessor’s formula. The game is not as feature-rich as its console brethren, but its core gameplay is still very fun and familiar.

Graham Russell: It’s clear that this game was designed by Magic: The Gathering pros as soon as you start it up, but that’s not always a bad thing. The tactics involved with every decision are balanced and require an awareness of others, and it’s a testament to its design that it doesn’t get old after a few dozen plays.

Runner-up: Fresco

Graham Russell: It’s hard for a worker placement game to break out of that box of having placement be a matter of arbitrary point values. Fresco’s framework of a day in the life of a fresco painter actually works, and manages to maintain its coherence well into its lifespan.

Eric Schabel: Before I played Red Steel 2, I had serious doubts about just how well MotionPlus would work for accurate swordplay. Thankfully, the game delivers not only as a proof of concept, but also as an enjoyable East-meets-West action adventure slice-em-up. Switching between swords and guns is seamless; the combat is so well done that it lifts up parts of the game that sag a bit, such as the mostly lifeless environments.

Andrew Passafiume: This is the first (and still only) Wii MotionPlus game I have played, but it’ll be hard to top it in terms of fluidity and controls. It’s a bit of a repetitive game, sure, but it manages to take the basic (and poorly implemented) sword fighting controls from the first and complete change them for the better. I was skeptical at first, but the MotionPlus really does add a lot to the gameplay, even if it is just the little things.

Runner-up: Kinect Sports

Graham Russell: The Kinect, as a product, lends itself to body movement, and Kinect Sports is the best real game so far that takes advantage of it. Just be careful, everyone: you’ll probably break things if you don’t clear out your play space.

What do you think of our picks? Agree? Disagree? Discuss in the comments!

SB Staff Picks ’10: Shawn Vermette

December 21, 2010

News / by Shawn Vermette /

One of Snackbar Games’ traditions is to have staffers pick their top ten games of the year. We’re so all over the map in our tastes that our lists are never similar. Today, news editor Shawn Vermette shares some offbeat selections.

Honorable Mention: Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale (PC). Recettear is a little indie title that was localized from Japan earlier this year. Part dungeon crawler, part item shop sim, this game was all addictive. Neither the dungeon crawling nor the item shop management were particularly hard or deep, but the milestones in sales you need to hit to continue in the game make it challenging. In the end, though, this game is totally worth playing for any fan of Japanese games.

10. Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth (DS). While different from the other Ace Attorney games, it retained the series’ trademark outrageous cases and writing. If it had included some courtroom drama in addition to the field work, it would have ranked higher on my list, as the Ace Attorney games are some of my favorite DS games to date.

9. Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver (DS). Yes, this was a remake. Yes, it didn’t have any new pokemon that would engender a new case of ‘gotta-catch-em-all’ fever. However, these were superb remakes of my favorite Pokemon games of the Game Boy/Game Boy Advance era and definitely reignited my passion for Pokemon games. READ MORE

Game (not) of the Year 2010

December 20, 2010

Features / Opinion / by Graham Russell /

We’re human. We don’t always get to every game before the end of its year of release. This is our way of making amends: the best games we missed out on until 2010. Because we can’t go back in time and honor them in a more timely fashion.

Shawn Vermette: Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I have to say, I love Star Wars. The best Star Wars games are, without a doubt, the KotOR games. However, after finally playing Lego Star Wars, I have to say that it comes in second, by a wide margin. The humor that Lego Star Wars infuses into such an epic and serious series is great, and the seamless co-op makes it a perfect game to play with a spouse. And of course, any game that I can play for hours on end with my wife is an instant winner.

Chris Ingersoll: Pinball Pulse: The Ancients Beckon was a 2009 DSiWare release from the Fuse team responsible for Metroid Prime Pinball on the DS. 500 points earns you a single table packed with awesome, and the option to see how high you can score on a single ball once per day. If you love pinball and own a DSi, this needs to be an immediate purchase. For actual releases, check out the bizarre Atlus RPG My World, My Way and Konami’s point-and-click adventure Time Hollow (both DS) if you can find them.

Andrew Passafiume: Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time. It’s definitely no secret that I am a huge fan of Insomniac Games and their hugely successful action/platforming Ratchet & Clank series, and this is one of the best platformers I have ever played. It takes everything I’ve loved about every previous entry in the series and manages to expand and improve upon them tenfold. When I played it, I was under the impression it might be the last time we see Ratchet and Clank, so it was a very sad, but great sendoff for two of my favorite game characters.

Gerry Pagan: Some people would probably murder me for this, but it wasn’t until early this year that I managed to play the oh-so underrated Psychonauts. I’m a sucker for a good platformer, and Psychonauts delivers with extremely well written dialogue, a diverse list of abilities to use as well as incredibly memorable stage design, all of which stand out on their own. Had I played the game when it came out, it would have most likely been my Game of the Year choice multiple times over.

Mike Clark: I didn’t become an owner of the Wii until September of this year. Due to this I was never able to experience all of the excellent Wii games released over its lifetime until now. Being able to sit down and fully play through Super Mario Galaxy three years later was quite a treat. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the 3D Mario games. Yet just from a few hours of playing Galaxy, I was already in love with it. The gameplay was excellent barring a few motion control segments, the pacing was wonderful, the audio was delightful, the visuals were great, and so on. Playing this after a three year drought was a blissful experience and I loved almost every second of it. Because surfing on those manta rays and rolling around the giant balls can go away.

Paul Bishop: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Even though I absolutely loved the original Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, I just didn’t feel like buying Uncharted 2 when it came out late last year. It eventually took a deal at the store for me to pick it up this year, and now I don’t know why I didn’t pick it up earlier. It’s amazing.

Justin Last: Torchlight. I picked this up on a whim during a Steam sale one morning and when I looked up it was time for bed. The Diablo formula has been improved on in every way here with easy modding (at least the installation – I’ve never tried to make one), great chunky WoW-like visuals, and randomly created dungeon floors. It’s completely possible to get lost in Torchlight for hours on end, and that’s why I had to uninstall it – other things required my attention.

Graham Russell: I only experienced the cathartic joy that is Red Faction: Guerrilla during the summer dead months. (I found it on clearance. I love clearance.) Shooting people isn’t that great, and the driving controls are adequate but unspectacular. What’s great here is building destruction, be it with explosives or just hacking away at it. There are days when you need that.

What older games did you just discover this year? Let us know in the comments.

SB Staff Picks ’10: Chris Ingersoll

December 20, 2010

News / by Chris Ingersoll /

One of Snackbar Games’ traditions is to have staffers pick their top ten games of the year. We’re so all over the map in our tastes that our lists are never similar. Today, we have Unplugged guru Chris Ingersoll. As usual, he slips a few December titles from last year into his list, but we can’t blame him.

For me, 2010 was heavily front-loaded. Most of the titles I really enjoyed came out in the first quarter, including what was technically December 2009, but thanks to some time-sink DS titles I was never really without a “current” game. My Wii definitely didn’t see as much action as my DS — or the DSi XL I picked up in July — but that’s mostly due to my dislike of platformers; Super Mario Galaxy 2, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and Epic Mickey are sure to show up on the lists of the other Wii owners on staff, but not here. Having both Monster Hunter Tri and Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon fall flat for me didn’t help my Wii’s suffering either.

Here’s what really caught — and held — my attention these last twelve months:

Honorable Mentions: Metroid: Other M, Glory of Heracles, Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light, Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, and Pokémon HeartGold/SoulSilver are all worth owning but couldn’t make the final cut.

Victim of Circumstance: Mega Man 10 (WiiWare). When I wrote my first list, I had Mega Man 10 in my top 10. Golden Sun: Dark Dawn shipped on November 29th and pushed most of my picks down a space, knocking MM10 out of my official list. While MM10 wasn’t the polished awesome throwback that MM9 was, it still contained plenty of 8-bit difficulty in the classic Mega Man style. Whatever failings the robot master stages might have suffered, the first stage of Skull Castle made up for it by being one of the most epic ever.

10. Infinite Space (DS): This turn-based tactical sim was perhaps the most ambitious title I played this year. There are a ton of ships and modules and a galaxy-sprawling story line. It’s a little dry and wordy, and the actual action is a modified version of Rock/Paper/Scissors, but if you’re in to crazy levels of customization then Infinite Space should steal some time from you. READ MORE

Kung-Fu Live

December 17, 2010

PS3 / Reviews / by Graham Russell /

Anything you can do, I can do better, huh? It seems like that’s Sony’s mantra lately. The company is taking on its competitors’ advances head-on, with the Move mirroring the Wii Remote’s functionality. Well they hadn’t addressed Microsoft’s controller-free Kinect, and it’s obvious that Kung-Fu Live is an attempt to give PlayStation gamers a taste of that experience.

You know, without the requisite technology.

But let’s start with the positives. Kung-Fu Live is a very stylish game, with a pulp-comic feel that’s entertaining (if at times a bit too stereotypical). In it, you stand in front of a PlayStation Eye and do martial arts moves to hit enemies. It isn’t a standard gesture-based system, as it just reads your arm and leg movements and deals damage when you hit. (There are, however, special moves you can do by sticking both arms out at once or crouching.) Want to jump to avoid a kick? Jump. The concept is solid. Between levels, the game takes shots of you in various poses and integrates them into a motion comic that tells the game’s story. It clearly isn’t a feat of clever writing, but it’s all about having fun. As a bonus, you can export the comics as images and share them.

But let’s get back to the gaping hole in this game’s planning. And sometimes that gaping hole is quite literal. See, the game uses a standard camera for motion detection, and sometimes it detects shadows as movement, doesn’t read a punch or kick at all or for some reason thinks you have a big hole in your chest or head. There was a considerable effort to counter this. Not only does the game warn you to wear clothing that contrasts with the background, it has many settings for detection and even an advanced mode to get granular about it. Well I don’t know who plays games in front of a blank wall, and I don’t know how I could change my skin to better stand out from the background. The settings helped a bit, but there are times when you’re jumping and kicking away and your on-screen counterpart isn’t registering anything.

The experience of trying to play Kung-Fu Live is a fun one. After all, you’re kicking and punching and jumping, and that’s fun to do any time ever. It’s in a fun world, and I’d really want to play it. On Kinect. But as we all know that’s not happening, it just doesn’t have the functionality on Sony’s platform.

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