Well! I'm certainly busy due to year end-ness, hence the lack of blogging -- I'm working on a few different retrospectives, a feature, an editorial and some reviews. Can 2009 be over yet?
Sincerely, I actually have a lot of fun closing out the year and parsing out the key takeaways, and rest assured you'll see more on this from me soon -- for now, have you been following Gamasutra's Best of 2009? We're doing the same kinds of individual lists that we did last year. Today, Christian Nutt rounds up the year's top business trends -- social games and digital distribution rising, music games declining, and devs getting wiser on how to succeed on iPhone, among others.
Speaking of iPhone, here are the year's top 5 iPhone games as chosen by our mobile editor Danny Cowan. Of the games here, Eliss is actually the only one I've got; I'm such a DS fanatic (whoa, DS beat PS2 in UK, by the way) that I rarely play games on the iPhone. Trism, one of the earliest titles for the platform, is still one of my all-time favorites, and I've gotten my nongamer friends hooked on the colored triangles too.
The only things I play on PC are Flash titles, indie games and interactive fiction -- and on the IF front, the annual IF Comp has chosen its winners, so I know what I'm gonna be doing on my long-awaited holiday break. Fortunately Gamasutra's Chris Remo exists to be our resident PC guru, and he has selected a detailed and well-thought top 10.
From me, the year's top 5 controversies, the news stories that set our tongues wagging the most this year, and that prompted the most discussion and debate. Irony of the year: The commenter who says the controversy over Orson Scott Card's involvement in Shadow Complex doesn't belong on the list -- and then drags out an argument against what he calls the "gay mafia" for some 83 comments. Nope, no controversy there. Silly me!
Incidentally, my pals at the AV Club and I recently assembled a "Top 15 Games of the Decade" list together, by committee. Temporally-congruent installments of my pet franchises -- Metal Gear and Silent Hill -- may be absent, but I think it's a solid list overall. One item with which I'm particularly pleased: I, along with the always-impressive Gus Mastrapa, championed for the inclusion of Vice City as the quintessential Grand Theft Auto, and I explained why:
The Grand Theft Auto series is known for masking clever satires of American culture with gleeful violence, and Vice City, a parody of 1980s Miami, makes the ideal setting for the decadence the series simultaneously idealizes and lampoons. Mafioso in Hawaiian shirts, polyester-clad cocaine lords, and petty moguls form the cast of caricatures the series does so well, populating a world where the excesses of its crime-spree gameplay feel appropriate. GTA’s intelligence is often lost in the hullabaloo over its violence, but Vice City simply asks players to be as absurd as the characters around them, creating a plausible, neon-soaked fiction that’s as funny as it is canny. Rockstar burdened San Andreas with too many disparate activities and rendered GTA IV with inappropriate gravitas, making Vice City the best whole-package showcase of the series’ brilliance.
Anyhow, I've been up to these things and lots more, and hopefully I grab time to keep you guys filled in as it all unfolds. More interesting is the question: Do you really care about year-end lists? Are they fun or annoying?
The Grand Theft Auto series is known for masking clever satires of American culture with gleeful violence, and Vice City, a parody of 1980s Miami, makes the ideal setting for the decadence the series simultaneously idealizes and lampoons. Mafioso in Hawaiian shirts, polyester-clad cocaine lords, and petty moguls form the cast of caricatures the series does so well, populating a world where the excesses of its crime-spree gameplay feel appropriate. GTA’s intelligence is often lost in the hullabaloo over its violence, but Vice City simply asks players to be as absurd as the characters around them, creating a plausible, neon-soaked fiction that’s as funny as it is canny. Rockstar burdened San Andreas with too many disparate activities and rendered GTA IV with inappropriate gravitas, making Vice City the best whole-package showcase of the series’ brilliance.
Anyhow, I've been up to these things and lots more, and hopefully I grab time to keep you guys filled in as it all unfolds. More interesting is the question: Do you really care about year-end lists? Are they fun or annoying?
[header post is the title of a song by Phoenix you can hear here; not coincidentally most music outlets seem to think the 'Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix' album is one of 2009's best.]
7 comments:
The controversy list was nice. The following crazy debate was even better.
Also Leigh, for iPhone games, I'd highly recommend Spider. The top iPhone game of the year for me and one of the most talking example of environmental storytelling in a long while.
I never really thought about Vice City like that. It does kinda make sense. I am still in the GTA III camp, though. I think that the GTA universe makes the most sense when it is YOU who are asked to commit crimes and foster mayhem.
I just started reading Orson Scott Card's Empire, and it's really interesting how the political polarization described in the novel is played out in those comments. I don't know what it means, because I haven't finished yet, but it is endlessly interesting. I am a fan of his writing, of Shadow Complex, and do not let politics hamper my enjoyment of either.
Spencer Ackerman already explained the listicles well enough:
"It’s listicle season, that magical time of the year when editors and reporters don’t believe we should have to work for our money, because, you know, the holidays and jingle bells and turkey and football and shit. So we put together weak, lame and intelligence-offending lists of pseudojournalism to make it seem like we haven’t checked out emotionally"
http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2009/12/07/the-only-listicle-that-matters/
I would still vote Saints Row 2 as the quintessential GTA. Foregoing that, I would give it to GTA IV simply because of its extremely well-done multiplayer; playing in a sandbox with a gaggle of friends is the highest form of fulfillment that game has to offer. :)
From a mess to the masses.
I think lists are the laziest, mostly meaningless kind of content for magazines, though more defensible if they're not the product of consensus (I'd rather read personal lists rather than aggregates).
Coincidentally kudos on your AVC contributions, as I like the site very much but their games coverage was generally their weak point for a long while.
Haha, I first read the Controversies article before that infamous comment exchange popped up. So much for Not easily offended~
I had to tear myself away from reading the comments much like a trainwreck Youtube thread...
Somewhat relatedly, it's rather nice that Dragon Age: Origin's man-on-man lovemakin' didn't make the kind of controversial splash we've come to expect. (Unless I was just never around for it...)
A man chooses; a slave obeys.
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