Remember back, if you can, to the games that came out last year. Which ones do you still play? These aren't necessarily my favourite of '08 – they are the ones that have lasted the longest and are still worth playing, even though I've owned them since they were new.
Fallout 3 came out in October and was easily a 60 hour plus game without any of the DLC expansions, which added significantly to the game's size and longevity. It pulls the easy RPG trick of having three different moral paths to follow (although "neutral" mostly necessitates a bizarre balance of good and evil decisions) which affects the perks and conversation options available to you. Bethesda's games can always be approached from different directions and Fallout allows you to explore stealth, shooting, hacking, lock-picking and negotiation, and specialise in two or three per play-through. The 20 great jazz tracks on Galaxy News Radio got old quickly though; I was praying for a quest to recover more records for Three-Dog.
A game I played more of though is GTA: IV. Critics say it's aged quickly since its April release but it's shooting system felt old when the game was new (Gears of War came out in 2006). The atmosphere and car handling haven't yet been bettered in open world games and the DLC episodes outshone the original game in terms of narrative. The Lost and Damned gave me the excuse to explore Alderney, least used of the three islands in the original game, with some characters that were more interesting to me than Niko. The Ballad of Gay Tony made better use of the hand-to-hand fighting and the reintroduction of sky-diving was completely new to IV. Maybe I'm just a terrible person, but pushing people in front of trains still makes me giggle maniacally.
June's Battlefield: Bad Company wins my 2008 Game of 2009 title for the completely arbitrary reason that releasing DLC in '09 is cheating. The campaign wasn't special but was enjoyable in a dumb, Die Hard kind of way. On-line maps have a few points where the same strategies are effective each time (using rockets to destroy certain gold boxes, for instance) but the number of possibilities in a Battlefield game makes “Battlefield moments” a completely appropriate term for DICE to be using in BC2 marketing. I can switch to the twitchy assault class when I get bored of the tense sniping; or to the support class if I want to help my squaddies; or to the specialist and demo classes if I feel like blowing some holes in the destructible landscape. Mining the road at the first defence point on Oasis, then hiding in the craters formed when my mines catch unsuspecting tanks is honestly the most fun I've had in a multi-player shooter. And it never gets old.
What are your 2008 Games of 2009? I expect more than a few will pick Burnout Paradise, but is anyone still plugging away at Mirror's Edge's time trials?
This was spotlighted here.
