Aggressively Uninformed

I really don’t have anything to say about politics at the moment, and though a football post is probably in order, that’s not what you’re getting. Video games aren’t our usual fare here, but over the last year our usual fare has been “not posting”, so any change of pace from that is nice. Maybe it’ll serve as a (lengthy) interlude before the playoffs start and the new Congress is seated.

First, a quick complaint. I recognize that it comes down to a good old-fashioned generation gap, and that I may be requested to evacuate the immediate lawn-like area, but it still catches me off guard how many people of the older generation don’t get video games. At all. They both fail to recognize video games as legitimate media, and fail to recognize that video games have continually evolved over the years to meet the demands of their growing audience. Because they remember that 20 years ago, video games were strongly geared towards children, they continue to labor under the assumption that video games are something to be outgrown. I consider my parents to be technically competent and generally aware of technological trends, yet even they frequently express surprise that I “still” play video games.

My mom is a little better in this respect; she seems to like the idea of the Wii, even if she never actually plays hers, and she had my old DS for a while to play a mahjong game we picked up in Japan. (There’s also her late sister, whose Tetris-playing stamina was nigh legendary.) Maybe with the four major video game platforms now embracing the “family gaming” concept, the DS and Wii having done it for years now, and the Move and Kinect bringing the other two into the fold, we’ll see the old assumptions fade away a bit. There is hope, after all–I don’t think I’ve heard anybody refer to a non-Nintendo game as “playing Nintendo” for a little while now.

With that, let us continue on to a mildly-cliché “end-of-year review”. These were my two favorite games of 2010. As some warning, my tastes are not particularly, er, mainstream, so I haven’t played Gears of God of War Solid: The Sands of Liberty, and don’t intend to. But then, my esoteric choices will be evident shortly.

Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City

This is a game you have never heard of. Unless I’ve told you about it while playing it, or you read Jeremy Parish’s stuff (which maybe you should).

This is not a game with a large target audience. It’s a little old-fashioned. There are no fancy cutscenes, there is no tutorial, and I actually had to read the manual once. On the surface, it’s tedious as all hell: the player is tasked with exploring a vast labyrinth and mapping it—by hand!—on the DS touchscreen, while fighting random battles. As the first few hours tick away, depending on the player’s tastes, this either does turn out to be tedious as all hell (the majority case), or reveals an intricate, elaborate world with fascinating corners to explore and rich details to discover (I guess I’m weird like that). I can think of pretty much one other person I know (a Mr. Legion, of the Connecticut Legions) who would likely fall into the latter camp with me. This is a classic, old-school RPG experience mildly reminiscent of the Bard’s Tale series.

Etrian Odyssey delivers a classic dungeon-crawling experience, yet is informed by a quarter-century of game design wisdom and evolution. There are no sudden deaths lurking around blind corners, no ridiculous Shadowgate-esque kills. Virtually every party death, of which there are plenty, is accompanied by a sense that it was the player’s own fault for getting in too deep, for getting careless and skipping necessary precautions, or for just being downright dumb.

On top of that, the game is beautiful, and the soundtrack is fantastic, with the PC-8801 sound lending it an appropriately retro feel. The music is made pretty distinctive by being full of drums, which is easily missed as they don’t really come across that well on the DS’s tiny speakers. But when fed through headphones, or, say, your computer’s speakers, the music really comes alive:

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There’s no in-game clock, so it’s hard to know how much sleep I’ve lost diving into the labyrinth under Armoroad. Seven DS batteries is the best estimate I can tender.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

Mario Galaxy, unlike Etrian Odyssey, is highly accessible, was widely-advertised, and contains a variety of dissimilar gameplay mechanics. What it has in common with EO is that it doesn’t really bother with plot, per se. What few threads of plot exist are woven weakly into the game, never getting in the way of interesting gameplay mechanics, like combining hot peppers and dinosaurs, and thoroughly confusing children about how gravity works.

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The game has shed even what sparse packaging its predecessor had. Gone is the sprawling Mario 64-style overworld that was Rosalina’s observatory, replaced by a lightweight, mildly retro world map for choosing a stage. Interludes laying out backstory for the world are eschewed, most such details being relegated to optional dialogues with NPCs. The result is distilled Mario action with minimal padding added to tie the many disjoint galaxies together into a single package. The game boils down to being an expansion pack of the first Galaxy game, with fresh platforming gimmicks and little tweaks and improvements scattered about. Considering what a solid game Galaxy was, it’s hard to ask for anything more.

Also, the Throwback Galaxy (spoiler alert?) is incredible.

Some of the others

On the puzzle-y front, I finally played World of Goo, which I recommend highly (thanks to the Humble Indie Bundle). I spent far too much time on Manufactoria, a Flash game about Turing machines (no, seriously). Finally, I dropped about 60 hours over two months into Star Ocean: The Last Hope, which is actually a pretty bad game in many ways, but which I am a little ashamed to admit I really enjoyed.

So, did you play anything good this year?