Bastion
Summer of Arcade has become a very impressive tradition on Xbox live. For the last four years a special selection of games has been released for a few weeks weeks during the summer. Another tradition, apparently, is for one of the games in this bundle to stand out as an amazing achievement in artistic story telling. Previous showings ‘Braid’ and ‘Limbo’ gave us two amazing platformers: one a time-travel platformer with a plot so deep and dark that no one can agree on wether it’s a failed love story, a tale of regret from men who dared to play god, or something else entirely; the other a look into a child’s twisted nightmares pitting innocence against darkness and true fright. This year we are presented with a proud and worthy work of art in Bastion.
2009 Year in Review: Game of the Year
It’s that time of year. The time where everyone gets together and starts to put together their year in review articles and podcasts. If you caught podcast 41, you heard what we at Everyday Gamers feel were some fo the biggest news stories of the year. We have at least one more year in review podcast coming, but when it comes to these kind of lists, there is one that is expected from every video game website: Game of the year.
So, we here at Everyday Gamers decided we would come together and give you and idea of what each of us feel are the five best games we each played this year.
Eric Bouchard:
5. Tie: Scribblenauts/Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure (DS) – Yes, I know starting out with a tie seems like a bit of a cop out, but I cannot help it. In what seemed overall like a down year for the DS, Scribblenauts and Henry Hatsworth were 2 absolutely can’t miss games. Scibblenauts adds a whole new twist to puzzle solving with no set way to beat each level, while Hatsworth combines platforming with puzzle gameplay in a way that is just astounding. The games stand out as the best on the handheld, and I dare anyone to play either one and not enjoy them.
4. Torchlight (PC) – In a world of big releases, it is rare to see an indie game catch on the way Torchlight has. Made by many of the creators of Diablo, Torchlight manages to be both a deep dungeon crawler and yet an accessible game for those not used to that type. You can pop in and play for just a bit or get lost for hours, something most games cannot balance. Excellent gameplay, an inventive inventory system with the ability to have you pet sell you items and 3 truly unique classes to play set Torchlight apart from other Diablo clones, and that’s not counting the mods people are already making available for the game. Heck, it deserves to be on the list if for nothing else than it has gotten me back into PC gaming.
3. Left 4 Dead 2 (Xbox 360, PC) – When Left 4 Dead 2 was announced at E3, there were many people, including some 0n this site, who thought it was too soon after Left 4 Dead. Many were afraid the game would just be Left 4 Dead 1.5, but it did not take long for that to be proven wrong. The sequel has surpassed its predecessor in every way, from tighter controls to longer, more involved campaigns. Add to that plenty of new weapons including melee based, new special infected, the uncommon common and more multiplayer modes, and Left 4 Dead 2 ends up feeling like much much more of a complete game than the original. This version is worth the $60.oo price point.
2. Dragon Age Origins (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) – This game was in the running for Game of the Year when I was first started playing. Bioware set out yo make Dragon Age Origins to be the spiritual successor to Balder’s Gate, and the company has achieved that. A deep storyline, excellent character interaction and a rich combat system make this an RPG to make hardcore RPG fans proud. In the end, however, that is part of why it did not make number 1 on my list, as the one the made it there was much more accessible and has the best Co-op I think I have ever played.
1. Game of the Year: Borderlands (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) - There is something magical about this game. Gearbox has managed to do the best job so far of combining an FPS with an RPG, and the cell-shaded look to Borderlands just helps add to the joy you get while playing it. Though the single player campaign is strong, you are really doing this game and yourself a disservice if you do not play it Co-op, and as such the 360 version may be the best because of Live. Random weapons, 4 unique character classes that can be leveled up in many different ways, enemies who level up based on the number of people playing and a wry humor that just permeates the game make Borderlands the clear choice for GOTY.
Honorable Mentions: Uncharted 2 (PS3), Street Fighter IV (PC, PS3, Xbox 360), Batman Arkham Asylum (PC, PS3, Xbox 360), Assassin’s Creed II (PS3, Xbox 360)
Patrick Adams
5. InFamous (PS3) – I was a little skeptical about the game until the demo released, once I got my hands on it I instantly knew it would be a day-one purchase. I’m not one to pay attention to the story in a game but InFamous made it hard not to with it’s sweet comic book art-style. The platforming elements in InFamous were very refined and overall the game is one of the best on the PS3.
4. Shadow Complex (XBLA) – Shadow Complex was so good that I almost added it to my top 10 favorite games of all time list. Yes it pays homage to Metroid but for someone like me who has never played Metroid it was still an amazing game. The game was very polished and overall just plain fun. Once I completed the game I only wanted to play more. I hope we’ll see a sequel sometime in the near future.
3. Uncharted 2 (PS3) – Everyone knew U2 looked beautiful and the hype for it was pretty high. Naughty Dog delivered and the game lived up to the expectations. Like the first one, U2 is like an adventure movie that you play and that’s awesome. With a thin line between the cutscenes and the actual gameplay U2 is right next to Killzone 2 as the best looking game to grace the PS3.
2. Red Faction: Guerrilla (Xbox 360) – I think the main reason RFG is #2 on my list is because it really caught me by surprise. I had heard nothing about the game until I played the demo and that demo was enough to make me go out and buy RFG on day-one. RFG is about destroying everything and destroying everything is as fun as a game can get.
1. Game of the Year: Borderlands (Xbox 360) – I went out on a limb and bought this game purely because of reading good things about it on Twitter and here it is my #1 one pick, my game of the year. The funny thing about my experience with Borderlands was that I played the entire game by myself. It was exactly what I needed, a blend of the action in an FPS and the addiction of collecting loot and leveling up in an RPG. Borderlands also has an art-style that hits the spot for me. With the announcement of plans to make it a franchise I am excited to see more of Borderlands in the future.
Honorable Mentions: Killzone 2 (PS3), GTA: Chinatown Wars (DS), Left 4 Dead 2 (Xbox 360), and N.O.V.A. (iPhone).
Yuoma
Borderlands
Spending my life as a self-proclaimed hater of “first person shooters” (FPSs if you’re nasty), I have had to re-evaluate my stance on this genre more and more frequently in recent years. I mean, even though I do see the merit in your Halos and your Calls of Duties, I just don’t find myself being attracted to these games like most of the people on my friends list are. But every once in a while along comes a game with a hook powerful enough to make me want to spend 50 plus hours looking down the sights of a shotgun, and seeing the funny bits fly when I pull the trigger. Games like Left 4 Dead with it’s zombies, Team fortress with it’s different classes and awesome art style, and Portal with its… Portals(?) ensnare me with something to do other than shooting the guy’s who are not from my country/planet. To this list of off-beat FPSs we can now introduce Borderlands, developed by Gearbox Software. I warn you, this will at times tend to read more like a love letter than a review.
Borderlands is a first person shooter with heavy RPG elements (or an RPG seen from a first person perspective?), with a strong Diablo-esque emphasis on grinding and loot collection. Stack on top of all this that all enemies, equipment and weapons are randomly generated and you have a game that will keep you addicted, while still managing to pack in a few surprises even after having played it for over 100 hours.
Story
Borderlands takes place in the colony planet of Pandora. A planet colonized and quickly abandoned by the government, and corporations once they saw how little there was in it to profit from, and how difficult it would be to survive in it for prolonged stretches of time. The only people left behind were the treasure hunters, some early settlers, unlucky employees and hordes of criminals who now prey on the civilians left behind. Most of the people who stayed behind did so because of their belief in a legendary vault of untold, and immeasurable treasures. The story in this game is easily the weakest part of the game, and at times it seems like a throw-away part of a whole which seems so well thought out, which is sad, because the characters can be so darn funny and interesting at times. At one point in the story you find out someone has died, and this is never followed through any further, almost as if they wanted to move you, but didn’t care enough to give this branch in the plot any closure.
Gameplay
Borderlands starts off as most FPSs do. You are give a gun, you are given a guide, and you are given some some easy mooks to kill. Where things start diverging from other FPSs is when you kill someone, or complete a mission and are given a set amount of experience, which in turn increases your level, making you stronger, tougher, and giving you more health. You also start getting skill points which you can use to develop your chosen character into the perfect killing machine, healing or looting machine.
There are four character classes to choose from:
*A soldier who can either heal his teammates or summon a turret to assist with the butt-kickery.
*A siren whose power allows her to explode in an elemental flash, become invisible for a few seconds, while she runs to or from danger, and then explodes again to knock out whoever is standing around her.
*The berserker who is an explosives specialist, or an unstoppable punching juggernaut.
*And the hunter, who can either be a deadeye sniper or a gunslinger with buffs whenever he uses handguns and revolvers, with a pet hawk who attacks and slows down enemies. He also drops extra loot for the whole party.
As awesome as single player for this game is, things just get better every time another player joins the game: enemies become tougher, which makes the little puppies you were fighting against in single player become fire, acid, or thunder-breathing monsters which will take a whole team, and a lot of bullets to take down. Treasure also goes up a few levels in awesome with more people in your party, taking your machinegun and replacing it’s bullets with rockets. You are doing yourself a disservice if you never play this game with other people.
The game also features player duels and arenas in which to fight your friends. Ignore these, as they are highly irrelevant. A properly built hunter can kill anyone within half a second of the start of the fight by summoning his hawk. A siren can kill everyone else. None of this is pertinent to your level, or to how awesome your weapons are. The game is made for killing monsters, and PVP battles are really unbalanced.
Weapons
As stated before, weapons in this game are randomly generated, which means that if you are really, very lucky you can find a super rare weapon, which will make your character into a spider killing god. There are different weapon-types in the game, including pistols, sniper rifles, shotguns, machineguns, and even some alien weapons. Every time you open a chest, or kill a baddie you have a chance of finding, say a sniper, or a sniper that does double damage, or a sniper that shoots fire bullets, or acid bullets… Or a sniper which shoots clusters of bullets, like a shotgun, or if you’re really lucky, all of the above. Also it can refill ammo automatically so you never run out. The possibilities here are endless, and all the examples described above are weapons I actually have. And they are all on my crappy character… (my good character has a revolver whose bullets rotate between all the elements in the game, and shoots as fast as an assault riffle).
Weapons are the reason most people who play this game will continue to play it well after their characters have all reached their level cap.
Graphics
Borderlands is powered by the unreal engine 3, so it obviously looks amazing. It has a beautiful cell-shaded style which gives it a bit of a comic-book feel, and gives the characters a lot of personality, and helps a lot with the humor behind them all. The game manages impressive draw distances, which is very helpful for us snipers out there. In fact, the only time I noticed any slowdown and frame skipping was when playing with a full party of level 50 characters we all spread out throughout a huge map and each fought innumerable hordes of spiders, and used ridiculous fast, powerful, acid shooting, explosion spamming weapons, but it soon passed, as those spider did not live for long.
Borderlands is easily one of my favorite games this year, and one of the games I’ve dumped the most hours into (considering it takes about 40-50 hours {more or less depending on skill} to complete all missions in the games, and even at that point your character will only be around level 36). Each character gives the player a different play style, and a different perspective on the game, and how to tackle each mission all over again. But you will continue playing this game with friends looking for the next, strongest weapon you could ever imagine. There is so much more that could be said about the unlimited possibilities for the weapons available to you in this game, but I really must stop; I just finished downloading the newest downloadable content for this game, and it’s zombies…ZOMBIES!!!
EDG Podcast Ep. #26 – Favorite Franchises in Other Hands
Listen in as Eric, Chris, and Yuoma talk what they’ve been playing as well as who they would like to handle their favorite franchises.
Hosts In: Eric Bouchard, Chris Maeurer, and Yuoma.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
EDG Podcast Ep. #23 – Just the Two of Us
Listen in as Eric and Yuoma talk about what they’ve been playing with some random discussion thrown in there for flavor.
Hosts In: Eric Bouchard and Yuoma
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Prototype
Developed by Radical Entertainment, who were also responsible for the critically acclaimed (and personal favorite) Hulk: Ultimate destruction, Prototype puts you in the shoes a super-human anti-hero striving to solve the mystery surrounding the virus that is spreading through-out New York City, and how exactly he is involved in it.
The Main character in Prototype is Alex Mercer, a man with little to no memories of his past, and with a virus cursing through his veins which gives him his super powers, and has the entire United States army chasing after him. As Alex you have to use your powers to infiltrate bases, steal memories, fight soldiers and clear the city of the ever increasing number of infected. The story is told well, and the memory stealing power/feature helps you get as much out of the story as you want to: i.e. you can breeze through the main quest, doing only the missions that will get you to the conclusion fastest, or you can roam every corner of the island looking for people involved with the development and release of the virus. The story is really dark and about as cheerful as a zombie movie with a female lead character.
A sandbox game, Prototype gives you a massive version of Manhattan island to explore and enjoy, which is a good thing because you will be spending a lot of time in it, both following the main story and finding all the hidden collectibles spread throughout. Also, although it’s not a perfect recreation of Manhattan, the designers did a great job of capturing the spirit of some of New York City’s more famous landmarks. I mean, it was cool to fight the army in Times Square, and to climb the Empire State Building to reach a glowing orb, or maybe even hi-jack a helicopter as it flies over Central Park; but my breath was taken away when i was running at full speed through the streets, and had to stop and take a closer look at the spot on Bryant park where i would take my lunch breaks.
The gameplay is really where prototype shines, though at times it seems like a fancier version of Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, which is not necessarily a bad thing considering how fantastic that game was. The controls are easy to pick up, and the various powers keep things interesting for a while. These powers range from razor-sharp claws, to a long tentacle, to an armored behemoth who gains massive amounts of defense at the cost of your usually ninja-like movement. I personally loved the way the character’s movements were animated: Parkour flipping through traffic and over buildings is great, but nothing beats being in the thick of battle, getting hit by a rocket, scrabbling on all four before running at full speed and using a devastator attack to kill everything within a two block radius. Oh, and did i mention this game is violent? well, it is. Violent and bloody. some of the ways you have of disposing of enemies would make the creators of Mortal Kombat write some concerned letters to their respective senators.
The one area where this game disappointed me was in the graphic department. Don’t get me wrong, running and fighting and blowing things up looks great; but as soon as you stop running and look at anything up-close it looks so ugly and last-gen that it will make you cringe. I mean, it is understandable that at the speed at which you run through crowds and destroy thousands of cars it would be too taxing to render tons of beautiful people, trucks or buildings; but the sheer ugliness of these characters, and the amount of repetition of the same faces in the crowd (i think there’s maybe 20 different civilian sprites in the game) as you’re passing by thousands of them, makes the graphic design feel lazy and does not show the care that was taken into almost every other aspect of the game.
All in all Prototype is a great playing, at times ugly looking game that will make you feel like you really have super powers. An exciting roller-coaster ride, although if you’ve played their last Hulk game it will feel like it’s a ride you’ve already taken.
EDG Podcast Ep. #21 – E3 ’09 Impressions
Listen in as Patrick, Eric, David, and Tom discuss their impressions of Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony’s E3 2009 press conferences and any other stuff that came up during E3 ’09.
Hosts In: Patrick Adams, Eric Bouchard, David Lange, and Thomas Pine.
Music By: Manuel Marino
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
EDG Podcast Ep. #18 – Boss Battles
Listen in as Patrick, Yuoma, Eric, and Thomas discuss what they’ve been playing as well as talk about their most memorable boss battles.
Hosts In: Patrick Adams, Yuoma, Eric Bouchard, and Thomas Pine
Music By: Manuel Marino
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
EDG Podcast Ep. #15 – We’re Back, We Promise
Listen in as Patrick, Eric, Tom, and Yuoma talk about what they’ve been up to as well as what they’ve been playing. Also join us for the second segment where we talk about the future of the site and how we want the readers and listeners to be involved.
Hosts In: Patrick Adams, Eric Bouchard, Thomas Pine, and Yuoma.
Music By: Manuel Marino
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
EDG Podcast Ep. #13 – What We’ve Been Playing
Welcome to the 13th episode of the Everyday Gamers Podcast. We apologize for the 2 week break but Patrick Adams had a fire at his house and things have been a little hectic lately. Everyone is safe but a lot of things were damaged so Eric Bouchard will be taking the hosting seat this week along with Tom and Yuoma. Listen in as they discuss what they’ve been playing and also a few movies they’ve been watching.
Hosts In: Eric Bouchard, Thomas Pine, and Yuoma.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.