2010 Year in Review

Well, it’s New Year’s Eve... a time to celebrate the triumphs and mourn the losses of the year past, while looking forward to the new challenges of the year to come. Of course, I mean all of this in the context of video games; I don’t want anyone to think I’m applying this level of self-reflection to my actual life.

Regardless, I thought this would be a good opportunity for a chronological review of my year in video gaming. 

Xbox Achievements: Or, How Developers Can Save Me From Myself

I recently decided that the number one most significant gameplay innovation of the last decade is the achievement system. You may argue with this, but I can think of no other concept that has more radically altered the way I play video games (not even multiplayer). There’s a certain aspect of revealing your entire body of gaming accomplishments that gently but persistently warps mind and spirit.

For example, back when my virtual conquests were a private affair, I could exercise a bit more self control regarding my gaming agenda. Let’s say it’s the spring of 2002 and I’ve got 200 spare hours of my life just lying around. If I decided to use those hours to drink beer with my friends and/or have sex with my girlfriend, no one needed to know I did so in lieu of power-leveling that little bitch Tidus enough to take on the secret Final Fantasy X boss Nemesis. Moreover, since there was no public record of this decision... who knows what really happened? With enough time and self-delusion... maybe history holds that I did defeat Nemesis after all.

In the Age of Achievement we have no such luxury. Now all our triumphs and failures are laid bare for the world to see, and I believe such exposure gives game designers a disturbing power over the way we play video games. To emphasize the seriousness of this issue, I thought I would list the top five most perverse behaviors I’ve been driven to by the quest for Gamerscore.

Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the seventh installment in the Call of Duty series.  Set this time in the 1960’s, it shows that the only thing with more longevity than the Call of Duty franchise itself is American nostalgia for the Cold War. I’d say things have gotten pretty bad when game developers start to think, “You know what people might enjoy fighting again? The Vietnam War.”

Like the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 single-player campaign, you play as a variety of characters, though most of the action centers around Studies and Observation Group (SOG) operator Alex Mason. During the campaign, you attempt to uncover a Russian plot to... ah, who are we kidding? Anyone who plays this game either (1) got it for the multiplayer, or (2) accidentally purchased it because they got it confused with a Splinter Cell game.

Shooting Up

I recently jumped on the Call of Duty: Black Ops bandwagon. (Or maybe just I fell off of the “I’m too cool to play the new CoD game” bandwagon—either way, I’m certain there was a wagon involved.) Regardless, the irony of this choice is threefold, because that’s as many fold as I feel like discussing right now.

I prefer to take the coward's way out, but I usually get executed first.

Irony the First: I typically avoid first-person shooters, largely because I’m not very good at them. I feel like there was some special gym class in high school or something where they taught everyone how to be good at shooters, and I happened to be absent that day. (I was probably pretending to be sick so I could play Final Fantasy II.) Sometimes in multiplayer my opponents don’t even shoot at me; they just point and laugh. In past years, however, games like Half-Life and Bioshock have worked to subvert my disdain by exploiting my love of RPG’s and trying to win me over with their amazing characters, environments, and story arcs. Slowly but surely, these games have paved the way for me toward more typical FPS’s.

Irony the Second: whenever my ego is feeling robust enough that I’m willing to subject myself to an FPS, I usually tend towards ones with more of a sci-fi flare. To me, games like Call of Duty seem like little more than the following: choose one from a collection of nearly identical guns, and then use it to murder a bunch of nearly identical guys in a series of nearly identical environments. I prefer the greater variety offered by games like Halo (where you fight against an invading alien force called the Covenant, which is trying to wipe out all of mankind), or Half-Life (where you fight against an invading alien force called the Combine, which is trying to wipe out all of mankind), or Gears of War (where you fight against an invading alien force called the Locusts... okay, so maybe the variety argument isn’t a good one).

Irony the Third: I only just got Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a few weeks ago, despite repeatedly telling my friends I wasn’t really interested. I actually only got the game because a friend of mine saw it in a used games store in Virginia and mailed it to me. Now, instead of not playing MW2 with them because I don’t own it, I’m not playing MW2 with them because I’ve moved on to Black Ops. What an asshole.

Anyways, I have to admit that the Black Ops multiplayer is addictive enough that I foresee myself playing it for quite some time. Maybe with enough practice I can graduate from “guy who gets knifed in the back while running around like a jackass” to “guy who gets knifed in the back while hiding in the corner trying to drive a stupid exploding RC car”.

Review: Fable III

It’s been about 50 years since your father (the Hero of Fable II) defeated Lucien and became King of Albion. While the billowing smokestacks of Bowerstone’s industrial district indicate much has changed in the past five decades, many things have also stayed the same; for instance, it’s still acceptable to start a conversation with a stranger by clucking like a chicken or farting in their face. The protagonist of Fable III is the youngest son of the former king, who at the beginning of the game flees the castle to escape the oppressive rule of his eldest brother, the current reigning monarch. Shockingly, it is soon revealed (by the same blind, manipulative bitch as the last game) that it is his destiny to lead a revolution, become the new king, and eventually defend the kingdom against a terrible ancient evil.

Genesis

For the past five years, I’ve been keeping a document with all of my video game conquests. It’s a tiny little Excel spreadsheet, a few hundred kilobytes summarizing thousands of hours of triumph and heartbreak. I keep it as a secret penance for a guilty pleasure; I figure that if I’m going to permit a box of wires and plastic to occasionally preempt my personal and professional life, then I should at least record the experience for posterity.

Terminating each row of this spreadsheet is a little review—barely a tweet’s worth—so that my future self will know what I’d thought of the game into which I’d just sunk a substantial chunk of my life. However, as the years wore on, it became harder and harder to contain my opinion in that one little line. I compensated by talking about video games to people who couldn’t care less: cab drivers, homeless people, baristas.... even my wife. Suffice to say it was a dark time.

Then, an elegant solution revealed itself to me... I could just write a longer review! In fact, I could even put it on the Internet! And thus, this blog was conceived. Worst case, it’s a lonely, unread repository for a bunch of my opinions on video games and gaming, opinions I would have put in writing regardless. Best case, it will be a way for me to relate to others the experiences of another 30-something man-child trying to balance his family, career, friends, and hobbies with his passion for (and addiction to) video games.