Playstation Vita – Will the West embrace it as tepidly as they did the PSP?  And will it perform as well in Japan as everyone thinks (and hopes) it will?  Already the analysts of the world are framing this as Sony’s fight for survival, and if their words really do have an impact on the business world, then should we be afraid that they seem to have their minds already made up about the Vita’s chances?

Personally, I think the Vita is a fantastic piece of hardware for the price, and it should have legs for years.  But what I think doesn’t matter one bit.  The only thing I’d dare to suggest is that Sony will be in trouble if all they focus on is portable versions of PS3 games.

3DS- The 3DS is doing better than the DS did at this point in its life, so all the proclamations of failure are kind of silly.  I wonder, though, if the market has changed so much that the measure of success has shifted as well.  People still expect Nintendo to prove themselves, and I’m no longer sure what the hell they have to do anymore to accomplish this.  Wait, I do know – smartphone versions of Nintendo franchises.  Since that won’t be happening any time soon, let’s move onto the next topic…

Smartphones – The market is there, and growing.  There’s no more debate as to whether they are legitimate, or whether they are a threat.  The only thing left to ponder is whether their influence will be better or worse for gaming as a whole.  The “traditional” industry, as it were, was already on the path towards monetization of its products.  But I feel that the app store gurus have accelerated the speed at which bad practices take root in the industry.  We now have publishers who are ready and willing to use the same tactics as Vegas in order to con people into parting with their money (and keep them coming back).  What else might we see?  And will the trend toward cheap, quick, brainless games lead to another crash?  The consumers being targeted by App makers are the most fickle of them all…

Wii U – The details are still sparse, and the hardware looks like it might be out of date upon arrival.  In a world which relies more and more on devices featuring ARM processors and low power consumption, the latter fact might not actually be a problem.  There seems to be two versions of Nintendo, one which focuses on pleasing fickle/hyporcritical/conservative/confused fans, and another which ignores everyone and shows us what we want.  I don’t think we can say anything about the Wii U until we see which face of the company shows up for this next console generation.

Microsoft – Microsoft is not afraid to throw things away and force people to move on.  They did it with the Xbox 1, and the most recent 360 dashboard update essentially has no patience for anyone without a Kinect.  And yet thanks to the success of the Kinect, the 360 could theoretically survive for a couple more years.  Microsoft could go down one of two paths by year’s end.  I have a guess as to which it will take, but I’m not quite certain enough to say it with confidence.

Indie gaming – I love the idea of indie games, and the options it grants to players and developers alike.  I can’t stand the types of navel gazing, vague, occasionally hostile products which indie game design so often churns out.  The word “indie” has taken on a meaning wholly separate from “independent”.  Where will the “scene” decide to go next?

Consumers – What is it we want from games?  What kinds of experiences do we like, for how many hours, and at what price? And can we accept the fact that we might not be able to have it all exactly the way we want?

Last time I did a year end retrospective, it posted two months after the end of the year.  I won’t make the same mistake twice in a row.  Here now are the highs and lows from my 2011 in games.  Note, as always, that this is not a “best games of 2011″ list, nor did all of the games actually come out this year.  These are simply the best (and “worst”) titles I played within the last twelve months.

The Tops

Async Corp

I actually posted my review of Async Corp. months after the initial draft was first written. and in the intervening months, I hadn’t actually played the game that much.  When I sat down to clean up the review and prepare it for posting, I insisted on sitting down with the game again, to see if it held up to the lofty words put forth in the first draft.  Suffice to say it passed the litmus test.  Async is the very definition of “pick up and play”.  You can return to it at any time without missing a beat, and the experience feels fresh no matter how long you are away from it.  Most importantly, it is not a game that you can play for “just a couple of minutes”.  It demands more attention from you, in a way that a good portable game should.  If every iOS game behaved like Async Corp., my iPod would be attached to my hip.

Portal 2

Portal 2 was easily the most pleasant surprise of the year. Valve addressed every single issue I had with the original Portal, and finally created an excellent, full fledged gaming experience out of the original concept.  The memes are gone, the puzzles are solid, the length is perfect, and most importantly, GLaDOS no longer annoys me.  Valve hit it out of the park, and my faith in them is restored three times over.  I will still debate against Portal 1, but will also go to bat for its sequel any day of the week.  Some people felt that Portal 2 still felt short of justifying itself as a full priced game, but if not for Gamefly, I would have bought it for $60 without blinking.  There aren’t many games I can say that about these days.

Fallout: New Vegas

Back when I played Fallout 3, I technically finished the game, but it felt more like I was calling it quits.  When I hit the level cap, I became unstoppable, and I still had about a quarter of the map left unexplored.   There was no challenge, and thus nothing felt interesting. Rather than be a completionist, I decided to go straight to the ending, leaving the remainder of the content for a second playthrough. I never got to that second playthrough, and that’s when I realized that Fallout 3 didn’t quite hit the mark.

Thankfully, it didn’t matter, because Fallout: New Vegas saved the day.  This right here is the true successor to Fallout 2.  It shows us what has happened to the American west in the years after Fallout 2, wherein the NCR is expanding its influence, and new factions are rising to fill in the voids left by the Enclave and the (alive, but struggling) Brotherhood of Steel.  It feels like home, and not just because of the setting.  The dialogue, characters, art direction, and all the new features make it feel like New Vegas really is a 3d representation of the same place that Fallout 1 and 2 occupied.

In addition, the story takes on a tone that is decidedly different than any previous entry. Your protagonist is not a Chosen One, but a nameless courier who gets screwed by The Man.  Your main quest is to get answers (and maybe some revenge), but the overall effect of the story and setting is to make you realize that you’re just a working stiff, and that the Mojave Wasteland is not a safe place for a lone person.  Technically, you can make a beeline to the main quest, but the game all but forces you to take a long, indirect path to the city of New Vegas.  This causes you to meet all the people and factions which make up the Wasteland, and you get a sense of the state of the area as a whole.  For the vast majority of the time, the story focuses on the lives and histories of everyone but the courier. As this review from Kill.Screen suggests, Fallout: New Vegas is the story is really the story of the Mojave; the courier, like everyone else, is just one of its many people.

The impact of this narrative focus is huge.  I have played New Vegas for months now.  I’m close to the level cap, but I don’t want to stop.  I enjoy being in this world, and I want to see all of it.  It finds ways to surprise me no matter how many hours I pour into it.  I never want it to end.

New Vegas suffers from many of the problems which plague all open world games, but I assert that it is one of the most interesting and fully realized open worlds of this console generation.  Every single game of this ilk needs to pay attention to how well New Vegas moves the focus from the protagonist to the world itself, because I believe it is the future of open world design.

The Disappointments

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron

I don’t want to invoke The King’s Camelopard with El Shaddai.  Unlike the famous incident from Huck Finn, El Shaddai is exactly what its sensational concept claimed it would be.  The execution is simply atrocious.  And yet there is something in the way in which it is atrocious that makes it almost (but not quite) feel like the creators were trying to pull a fast one on us. Furthermore, the game does all it can from the very start to fuck with the player in ways that felt more hostile than playful.  The Camelopard comparison does not fit, but I do think that a hearty chunk of the praise thrown at this game is from people who are either dying to appear artsy, or are trying to save face after the final product didn’t match up with all the gushing they did during the preview phase.

I’m trying to write a longer piece on how El Shaddai fails, but here’s the synopsis.  It takes  Devil May Cry  1’s combat system and ruins it by modifying enemy behaviors and damage scaling in a way which is unnatural for an action game.  Visually, only the 2d environments are truly gorgeous.  The 3d levels are mostly abstract voids filled with basic shapes and (sometimes) lots of color.  The story  - already based on an obscure religious tome – deliberately withholds all sorts of information from the player in an effort to become even more sparse and confusing.

Also, there’s a 2d mission which serves no purpose other than to let four archangels comment on how nice they look in a giant stained glass painting.

I wish El Shaddai had turned out better, and I do think we need more risky, experimental games, but there’s a difference between an earnest failure and a failure caused by people fucking around.  In the case of the former, I always find something in the game to admire, and ultimately I’ll go to bat for it.  In the case of the latter, I’d rather see it fail, as a warning to anyone who would think of passing off their self-indulgent vanity project as something worth our serious consideration. You don’t get to use experimental art as a cover for your circle jerks.

Shadows of the Dammed

Let’s pretend that Suda51 has his own subgenre of “Suda51 games”, roughly analogous to a subculture like, say, steampunk.  Just like Steampunk, Suda51 games might have had some meaning behind them at one point.  But just like modern Steampunk has devolved into anything with goggles and corsets, modern Suda51 games are becoming known for nothing more than guitars, fashion and schlongs.  Shadows of the Dammed is filled with all of Suda’s trademark visual cues – it may have a different tone and subject matter than No More Heroes, but they both contain protagonists with styled hair, a stylized jacket, a craving for sex and a weapon which acts as an instant dick joke.  The game also spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the inner workings of its setting (the underworld) without ever showing you all that much of it.  Of course, this is entirely due to the fact that the exposition exists solely as a vehicle for more crude jokes.

Worst of all, the game is a bore to play, even though it plays exactly like Resident Evil 4.  That’s right folks; Shadows of the Dammed screws up the design of the greatest action game in a generation, mostly due to the nature of its enemies.  There aren’t often that many on screen at a time, and the standard ghoul has a serious physical handicap which prevents it from every hurting you.  They have this preferred move in which they run up and jump kick you, only it never connects.  Ever.  I lost count of how many times I left a fight with minor damage because enemy attacks whiffed as I stood completely still. If collaborator Shinji Mikami was any more involved than being an executive producer for this game, then I’m not sure how he dropped the ball like this.

Throughout the years, I have never been entirely sold on Suda51, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy Killer 7 and Flower, Sun and Rain.  Shadows of the Dammed trades their sloppy but fascinating experiences for surface level flair and polish atop an empty shell of an action game.  Without a doubt, the biggest WTF of the year.

In Async Corp, players are given two wells filled with squares of three different colors. Players select one square on each side to swap with each other in order to form a packet.  Packets are generated whenever some number of same-colored squares are arranged in the shape of a rectangle (squares being rectangles too, of course).  The rules of the game state that a swap can only occur if it will create at least one packet, and packets themselves can be cleared off the screen by touching them (clearing packets becomes, ultimately, the point of the game).

The most important similarity between Async Corp and other good puzzle games (and some traditional board games, too) is that it embraces the rule of “easy to learn, challenging to master”.  You can pick up the rules in an instant, and once you know how to form packets, you can make genuine progress in any of the three available modes.  There are still strategies and advanced moves to uncover, for instance the titular Async, in which a move creates two packets, one in each well of blocks.  But what makes Async so effective is that cranking out basic, 2×2 packets can get you surprisingly far at first, and even as you improve, this technique doesn’t go away.  It understands that exposure can be as important as innate skill or intelligence in regards to improving at a game. The longer you play, the more likely you are to pick up on new patterns and strategies.  And the only way you’re going to play that long is if you continue to find the mechanics interesting. Async Corp’s base design is simple in that way that generates a primal, powerful feeling of fun.  It keeps you going for hours, then days and even months.

It also helps that Async Corp’s design doesn’t try and obfuscate the secrets to better play.  For example, one of the first things newbies can do to improve their chances is to start with a small packet and make it bigger, by gradually surrounding it with like colors until it starts to grow.  Since packets don’t leave the screen until the player taps them, the “building block” to this technique is quite literal, sitting there staring at you (again, literally) as you play.  As for getting an Async, the nature of the move is such that most players will probably create one randomly within their first thirty minutes. Players won’t go too long without seeing something which will turn out to be very important later on (Miyamoto would be proud).  We have enough puzzle games in which pieces vanish instantly, where chain reactions occur without understanding why, and walls of text bombard you with information on combos you may never have planned.  I appreciate Async’s willingness to allow players to focus on real, genuine strategy, rather than forcing them to comprehend every item on a checklist of features.

Async Corp. offers three main modes of play, each one having a different focus.  Async mode asks you to create a giant, well-sized packet for each colored block.  You have a limited (though generous) amount of moves, but otherwise you can take as much time as you want to plan things out and think through bad situations.  Quota mode has a growing meter, which will result in a game over if it reaches the top of the screen.  Players can decrease its size by shipping packets; the larger the packet, the more you push the meter back.  Here, quick thinking is of the essence, as the meter itself will grow at an ever increasing speed.

The third mode, Zoning, is in a way a combination of the previous two.  In a reverse of Quota, shipping packets increases the size of a meter, and getting it to the top advances you to the next level.  However, every second spent not shipping a packet will cause the meter to wane.  You have to plan out your initial moves, execute them with precision, and then think on your feet to come up with enough moves to finish the job.  It is the most exciting mode of the three, though it is also the one I’m always most afraid to attempt.  I admit this is a bit silly, considering the mode has no failure state. If the meter resets to zero, you simply try again, as much as you want.

Aesthetically, Async Corp. is simple and colorful.  Lumines is a clear influence, as evidenced by the shape of the playing field, and the various colored “skins” you unlock as you play. The theme song is catchy and calm, and is a good example of how to compose a game jingle that doesn’t lose its catchiness after extended exposure.  Ironically, one of the game’s “defects” turned out to be one of my favorite features.  Due to time constraints, Async Corp. was unable to ship with Game Center integration and other social networking features.  I think this ends up being a benefit in the long run.  Over time, the game has received strong reviews and plenty of praise over Twitter.  Without achievements and the like, we can be sure that people were driven to play by Async’s sheer entertainment value, rather than because it dangled a carrot on a stick in front of them.  Furthermore, the lack of bells and whistles means the game boots up quick and keeps from distracting you.  It feels like a game, plain and simple.

Async Corp. is, without a doubt, my favorite game on iOS, and an absolute gem of a puzzler.  It is also the rare example of a modern puzzle game that takes inspiration from Tetris and the other greats, rather than trying to beat them.  By implementing a small, simple set of rules, and allowing them to build naturally into more complex situations, it winds up becoming a addictive, user-friendly, genuine puzzle game.  Not a game with an arbitrary learning curve to try and get over.  And not an IQ test either.

In other words, by learning from, not trying to outdo the greats, Async Corp. knocks on their door.  Will it be let in?  That all depends on how many people give it a chance.

Where to start?  Visually, the background objects are gorgeous, but the foreground environments are criminally ugly.  The game often tries to hide this by placing levels in the dark, or by filling setpieces with several layers of tear gas smoke. It doesn’t always work, and when I got the chance to stare at some of the more atrocious urban environments, I wondered if I was looking at an Xbox 1 game.

Mechanically, it tries to do too much and too little.  You have the ability to issue commands to your AI controlled squad of allies, but each individual order takes up its own face button on the controller.  As a result, the actions for your own character (Kane) are limited to the A (or X on PS3) button and the shoulder buttons.  There’s no way to enter or exit cover manually, because there’s no room for such an operation.  Meanwhile, the A button becomes multipurpose, and you have to push the left joystick to both sprint and to bring up your next objective.  In other words, the controller layout is clunky, and the controls themselves are insufficient compared to the options and abilities you technically have.

This would be more understandable if the game was designed around its squad mechanics, but it fucks this up as well.  Most squad oriented games either allow the player to issue orders to the whole team, or to no one at all.  Here, some  commands are sent to everyone, while others are issued to specific people.  Having the ability to specify targets for your mates is worthless when you have to cycle through each one to tell them to attack.  After the first two levels, I mostly ignored the squad mechanics; I was too busy trying to keep myself alive, scrambling to find a piece of cover that Kane would actually hide behind.

Not that it would make too much of a difference – for whatever reason, you can still get hurt when behind cover.  Rather than being a protective barrier, cover simply allows you to die a little more slowly.  When the difficulty starts to ramp up in the later levels, this makes it hard to get your bearings straight and determine a course of action.  If you sit around thinking for too long, you’ll be killed.  But if you move around in open, you’ll be killed even faster.

What to do in such a situation?  I was never quite sure.  Kane and Lynch is the kind of game which thinks that challenge should come by putting the player in increasingly unfair matchups.  Early in the game, you’ll be fighting cops at close range, using automatic weapons that outmatch their pistols and shotguns.  Every shootout is from close distances.  Later on, you will fight with soldiers and mercenaries from long range, often with inferior firepower.  The inaccuracy of your arsenal makes it much harder to kill even a single foe, all the while they respond with a literal hail of gunfire.  I’m not quite sure how I ever got past some of the shootouts near the end.  I suppose using the squad commands might have made things easier, but the game never gives the player any strong indication that they’re effective.  That isn’t to say that your AI buddies never kill anyone – they just don’t do it much when you tell them to.

If you’re like me (or should I say “me before I played this game”), you might be wondering why Kane and Lynch wind up having to fight hardened mercs.  The answer, at least for me, is that the story is nothing like what I imagined it to be.  I thought it would be about a pair of longtime partners in crime, trying to get complete last score with their heads intact.  Instead, Kane and Lynch are strangers at the game’s beginning.  Their plans switch from bank heists and prison breaks to battles with revolutionaries and mercenaries in South America.  It is one thing if a person has a short attention span, but in this case the game itself can’t get through a whole game of “Cops ‘N Robbers” before deciding to switch to “Army Men”.

What’s more, the game isn’t really about Kane and Lynch.  The “Dead Men” suffix of the game’s title refers not only to the duo, but to the posse of cons who follow them around for much of the narrative.  While these crooks don’t get anything in the way of character development, their presence ensures that Kane and Lynch don’t get much either.  We barely learn anything about Lynch’s violent, psychotic episodes.  In fact, after a certain point in the game we stop hearing about them at all, nor do we ever see him take his medication (or even see him struggle with his lack of it).  As for Kane, he is the real focus of this story, but he’s not so much a character as a loose collection of vague statements. Much is said about the man’s past, but none of it is ever placed into context.   This doesn’t just hurt the characterizations – the story itself is driven by the thinnest of motivations as a result. There’s no reason to care about anything that happens in Kane and Lynch.

Not that there’s much to care about.  I finished Kane and Lynch in two days, in a handful of sessions.  Normally, when a critic pegs a single player campaign at six hours, it ends up taking me quite a bit more.  With Kane and Lynch, I was shocked to see how fast I got to the end credits.  Even with a multiplayer component, there’s no possible way this would have been worth full retail price.

I thought (and still think) that Kane and Lynch is a great concept.  In an industry filled with heroes and anti heroes, I’m fascinated by the concept of a game in which the protagonists are criminals and fuck ups.  Bad people without a chance for redemption.  How do you convince the player to play through an entire campaign as such monsters?  What low depths could you explore without becoming too tacky, or treading into exploitation territory?  These are questions which this game is unable to answer, because the entire experience feels like an incomplete thought.

Kawazu has a long history of working on the SaGa games, and it is entirely reasonable to call TLR a stealth entry in the series, since it has many of the hallmarks. Aside from standard battle system/plot dichotomy, there’s a wonderfully imaginative world that very little is actually done with, entertaining side characters that never really break into the third dimension, incredibly good music that has only bits and pieces of substance to go with, and enough sidequests to deliberately avoid the main story for hour on end. Atmosphere is fed in small spoonfuls for completing hour-long quests, while stat increases are passed out like candy on Halloween after every single battle.

After all of that negative talk about both SaGa and this game, I still really enjoyed much of my time spent on it. Of that enjoyed time, perhaps 10% was actually plot – the parts that are most enjoyable, of course, are totally independent of the reckless, clueless main character (appropriately named Rush) and focus instead on Marquis David of Athlum and his subordinates, as they struggle to deal with the political realities of the world. The other 90% was spent chasing various rabbits cleverly disguised as sidequests; find this dungeon somewhere on the world map, often via dungeons, and then explore it until you fight a boss. Along the way you’ll gather materials, adjust unit layouts to deal with new enemies, acquire various items, find optional bosses and so on. At least half of the dungeons are fully optional and many of them can be accessed not long into the game – although if you spend a long time leveling up your initial characters, you’ll run into difficulty when you get new ones that are either more relevant or are better long-term.

The battle system includes lots of bars and numbers. It will make you feel important.

The battle system, of course, is the best part of the game. It’s an unusual approach to making the game feel larger-scale; rather than individual characters fighting, you organize people into groups (Unions) with combined health, give them high-level commands (Attack with Combat Arts!) and point them at the enemy. They’ll do their best to follow your commands, but they might get intercepted by an enemy unit and have to readjust. Other mechanics, such as deadlocking (once two units are engaged, neither can move to attack others until one of them disengages deliberately), long-range attacks, formations, a morale system, and so on lend more credence to this large-scale approach. In the end, the result is much the same as a standard RPG; if you win, you get rewards and occasionally stat increases to individual units. Since this is, of course, a modern RPG, and casting spells or using items between battles is simply barbaric, TLR restores all health between battles. The only penalty for losing a unit entirely is that nobody in that group will improve for that battle.

Unfortunately, The Last Remnant went the standard Kawazu route for difficulty balance and made enemies scale with a “battle level” which measures your progress. This means that grinding will often not help you overcome a particularly hard boss. In the PC version, at least, it rarely hurts you – but it’s not like it will help you move through the game faster if you spend 10 hours sidequesting before continuing with your plot. Many optional bosses will be incredibly difficult until you reach a certain point – and even then, will require very specific strategies to overcome. Storyline bosses, meanwhile, will still slaughter any unit sent in to deadlock them, which makes even storyline boss battles an endless loop of resurrecting your dead unions while putting up enough of a wall to hold the lines. This constant life on the edge during battles makes the victory in the end sweeter, but it also makes it feel totally ridiculous and somewhat random.

One of the later dungeons in TLR. Lots of variety in dungeons, which is good since that’s where most of your time will be spent.

Luckily for the PC player, The Last Remnant is not only available on PC, it is by far the better version of the game. It has good gamepad support, adjustable graphics, dual-language voice options, and the most important part – a turbo mode for battles, which makes them easily three times faster. Although a casual PC gamer may not have the specs to run the game, anyone trying to keep up – even on less graphically intensive genres – will probably have a machine capable of running it. Still better, since it’s on Steam, it can be bought on the cheap at least twice a year – and still seems to be fairly popular.

Since I make a habit of doing a quick plot overview pretty much all the time, I may as well give TLR the benefit of the doubt – someone may be intrigued enough by my summary to consider the game. Rush is a guy living on an island with his (adoptive? they’re vague) sister. She gets kidnapped by a guy with a flying Remnant (oh yeah, Remnants are ancient, mysterious tools that can do many things and are bound to people). His parents are busy on the continent doing Important Remnant Research and totally impossible to contact, so Rush runs off on his own to find his sister. He runs into the middle of a battlefield where David Athlum is beating down some monsters. Upon introduction, David recognizes his last name and decides to help him out for no adequately explained reason. Much of the rest of the game is spent taking on increasingly unrealistic challenges, coupled with revelations about who wields true political power in a world filled with destructive and/or beneficial ancient tools that nobody really understands. Only in the end, of course, does the title become relevant. There is a Remnant, and it is The Last One. The end. The entire game is full of people with poorly explained or simply unexplained reasons for the decisions they make. There are a couple of cool cutscenes, but there is nothing redeemable in the plot.

To be honest, though, it’s not like the plot is that bad. It is no Final Fantasy, filled to the brim with melodrama and with endlessly intertwining backstories. Nor is it a Dragon Quest, filled with standard vignettes to fill the space between dungeons. There is plot, and while it is not good, neither is it unbearable. It merely is, and if the player can simply go with the flow and let it wash over them, it can be fully ignored and the battle and item customization systems enjoyed for their own sake.