GT's top 10 anticipated games

Zelda has me worried. I think Wii's gimmicky control scheme is okay for casual games, but when I sit down to play Zelda, it's usually for long stretches over a week or two. Without a normal control option, I'll have to pass on it.

I was worried about Smash Bros. Brawl for the same reason, but they reassured us early on that it would support all different controllers.

..isn't Deus Ex: HR, Dungeon Siege 3, Dark Souls and inFamous 2 on the list..?

that would be like me saying you don't have to read A Game of Thrones to enjoy a Clash of Kings

More accurately, it would be like saying the best way to enjoy Clash of Kings would be to read a one-paragraph synopsis of A Game of Thrones first. One written by a ten-year-old.

Some opinions from Zipp....

@ Zelda: I actually enjoyed the controls of Twilight Princess, but they didn't do anything revolutionary enough that I would've minded playing on a gamecube controller. And flipping the whole map was just needlessly confusing for someone who has played Ocarina of Time as many times as me.

My real problem with modern Zelda is that it's lost the epic feeling of the original Zeldas. I went back and played Link to the Past recently and was shocked to find that it not only still held up but actually still felt huge. I mean, bigger than Morrowind. I think that it's because, even though the game itself is DEFINITELY smaller than most of the later Zeldas, every environment was extremely unique. It had deserts, rivers, forests, mountains, even an ice land. It's the same reason that Mario 3 still feels bigger to me than Mario Sunshine.

Ocarina of Time and even Majora's Mask were similar in uniqueness (less so on Majora's Mask, by far), but then Wind Waker completely destroyed it and Twilight Princess only emulated it... by which I mean that, although it also had deserts, rivers, and ice lands, they were no longer as unique as they once were. More like staples of the series, at this point.

For a Zelda game to really impress me again, it would have to create an entirely new set of environments or else expand greatly on the old environments so that they were not just ammendments to a world map, but more like worlds unto themselves (Mario 64 was a good example of this, so was Mario Galaxy).

@ Fleinn: Dark Souls is on the list, actually. I wish Deus Ex: HR was, but I'm not surprised that it isn't. After all, we have no real reason to believe in that game, just because we've seen some pretty cutscenes and a few short demos of gameplay. There's too much promise there, not enough solid info, and too much ambiguity about whether the game had enough time in development for people to put money on the game. Except for me, who preordered it. But even I am not going into it with gusto. I am very interested in transhumanism but who knows how deep the game will take the concept. I am excited, but I have had dreams shot down so many times in the video game world and on more stable franchises.

Not that I don't have faith. It's just a quieter faith than usual.

Infamous 2, Uncharted 3... it's kind've a take-your-pick. Uncharted 2 was more polished than Infamous 1, so I imagine that's why it made the list instead. Not that Infamous isn't a good game.

As for Dungeon Seige 3, I think that's being developed by Square Enix...? If so, that's your reason right there. The only thing SE does well anymore is graphics and music.

@ Suskie: Definitely more accurate. And that sums up how I felt playing the demo of Mass Effect 2. "I'm really enjoying this!" was one side of my brain. "I have no clue who these people are or why I should care," was the other side.

Result: skip all dialogue. don't ask questions. kill things. Fun overall, but I couldn't help but feel I was missing a large piece of the point.

Dungeon Siege 3 is being published by Square-Enix but I believe it was developed by Obsidian (Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas), so it could go just about any direction. I'll be playing it shortly after launch, one way or another (probably on PC).

Zipp: I guess you haven't heard me talking about Mass Effect: Genesis, then. It's an interactive comic made for PS3 players that walks you through the first game's story. And it sucks. It's poorly written, it skips over huge plot developments and asks you to make difficult decisions without the hours of character development and dramatic conversations required for the impact. I could tell you that ME3 has my favorite story of any game ever (which I stand by), but you could watch Genesis and have no idea why. I hate that it's spoiling the story for PS3 owners.

Anyway, hence the one-paragraph synopsis comparison.

Just a warning though: while playing Mass Effect would fill you in on the story of thr trilogy, it's a pretty dismal game by itself.

One of these days, I will comment on how extraordinary Mass Effect is and it WON'T immediately be followed by someone sounding off on how disappointed they were by it. That day is not today.

On the other hand, RD loved Lost Odyssey, so I guess I break even.

Be thankful to have a series you love enough that such comments bother you as much as they do, Suskie. I like individual games within a number of franchises quite a bit, but there's no series that I presently hold in consistent high esteem to the extent that you do Mass Effect. It's awesome that you have that.

This year's E3 so far is making me realize that while I still like video games a lot and love many details about the industry that bore the casual gamer, I've lost some of the fire that I had. I see all these upcoming blockbusters being announced and some of them that I know once would have excited me now just make me feel tired. I hope for good things from Sony and Nintendo's conferences but fear that at least one of them will disappoint me.

@ Dungeon Siege 3: oh wow, just about any direction IS the best way to sum it up! That developer has released such a mish-mash of games... in my mind Alpha Protocol is the biggest "is it good?" game of all time. I'm still not sure and I've played the damn thing.

@ Suskie: Another oh wow, this one bigger than the first, because I can't believe they've actually done that. I thought you were just being insanely clever about the way ME2 opens, with its "do you remember this, naw, you don't" gimmick. Do you mean ME2 with the best story or ME3?

@ Jason: You have just described the reason I've finally given up on acquiring new games (though I still enjoy reading about the latest things, as you can tell). Tired. Oh so tired. It is an investment to play video games, an investment of time and money and, yes, even energy. That investment used to always pay off, but it has done so less and less frequently for me as the years have gone on. I'm no longer sure of the reasons, but I find now that I get more enjoyment out of strange things like nice leather furniture and 20 mile hikes in the woods then I do out of video games.

I agree. Somehow the excitement has gone from games. I still find some intriguing and I enjoy playing, but I don't get the same energy I used to.

Part of it has to do with the era we grew up in. Then, there weren't as many games and there was generally a "leading" game in each category every few months. For example, I remember that Super Mario World was the leading platformer at roughly the same time that FFIV was the leading RPG and Pilotwings the leading Flight Simulator and Actraiser the leading Action game. You basically picked what genre you liked and there was a game you HAD to play in that genre, and then a series of not-as-good games that you could choose from as they came. You only had to own one system and sequels rarely had anything to do with each other (even in the RPG genre!) making it possible to come into a series mid-way through and be fine.

Now think about how things go. About fifteen games come out each month, and that doesn't count indie games and computer games. We're probably talking somewhere between fifty and a hundred games a season (meaning that in one year of modern gaming, the amount of games that is released equals the entire catalog of the NES), and it can be difficult to ascertain which of those leads its genre, if one even does; not to mention that many games cross genres with usually less-than-impressive degrees of success.

We also have to buy multiple systems if we want to experience a wide spread of games. Worse, we sometimes have to buy multiple systems just to play all of the games in a particular series. Particularly heinous are the handheld systems. What started as the gameboy, a system designed to play simpler, no-color games while traveling (games that ultimately couldn't match their SNES rivals but were fun enough to hold your attention) has become systems with exclusives within a series, like the PSP with its metal gear solid games (whose stories are more or less essential to the full timeline) or gimmicks you won't find anywhere else (like the DS and 3DS) or even back catalogs and remakes that are enticing to the same people that are naturally bothered by the "evolution" of gaming (see the many releases of FFIV).

Can you imagine if we'd been told, back as kids, that we had to own two systems just to experience both Mario and Zelda? If we'd asked our parents to buy us TWO systems instead of one? We would've enjoyed a lot more of the great outdoors, is what would've happened.

Another point: what is sometimes most tiring to me is that today's games are designed seemingly with sequels in mind, sometimes going so far as to simply NOT END or to leave blatant plot holes "to be fixed in the sequel." And forget plot, developers treat each title nowadays like a beta for "next year's sequel." It's been a hell of a long time since I've heard a developer call their new game anything other than a franchise and it's been even longer since I've seen a game released that felt truly tested, polished, and tweaked to the point where there were no problems or the problems only showed themselves after extensive replay. These days, I never feel like I'm playing a full game. I always feel like I'm playing unfinished ideas that will be developed in some sequel to come. Even fan favorites, like Arkham Asylum felt like this.

Finally, games these days are much much longer. I just finished playing the original Metal Gear, and while I didn't particularly love it, I was able to finish it because it was only a couple hours long. I've since moved on to the second one, which is incredibly excellent, and I feel okay with savoring it, checking every corridor, room, and listening to every codec call, because I know that even with the maximum time I could possibly invest in it, it will be somewhere around 5 hours long... maybe 10 if I'm way off mark in my estimation of its length.

Hell, I talked to EVERYONE TWICE in Chrono Trigger my first time through and got every item and did every quest and leveled to something ridiculously high for that game, like 60, and still finished within 40 hours (I was closer to 30).

Persona 3, on the other hand, a game with essentially no side quests, took me nearly 100 hours to beat... and I didn't even fool around that much with creating personas.

Now that would be fine. I don't particularly mind games being long. Back in the PS1 era I poured enough hours into FF7 that the clocked maxed out (99.99 hrs). I think I clocked somewhere around 130 hours and most of it was just spent at the Gold Saucer and thoroughly exploring the world. By the time I was done, I knew EVERYTHING about the world of FF7 (until they mucked it up with sequels). And many of the games released today justify their long playtime, with plenty to do, co-op or other multiplayer options, multiple paths through the game, and various difficulty modes, not to mention unlockables, findables, and trophies (which is one of my favorite modern-gaming conventions).

But how can I justify spending 130 hours exploring everything that Mass Effect 3 has to offer when Elder Scrolls V is being released a month later? A somewhat made-up example, but you get the point I hope. For me, I find myself rushing to the ending of a game just to free up my time for "next month's release."

That's why I'm making Deus Ex 3 my last game, at least for a long while. I want to enjoy the hell out of it. And if it doesn't have more than 20 or 30 hours of gameplay, then, hey... maybe I'll replay it and try some different paths... or if that isn't available I'll have plenty of time to go back and explore Red Dead Redemption and Persona 4, two games I didn't ever finish because new games came out too quickly.

You make a lot of valid points, and your final one is something I've been taking a stand on recently (to myself). I realised I was pressing on through single player games in haste, and I kept referring to the stack of games I "need to get through". A couple of weeks ago I made the decision to play games at leisure rather than powering through them, on the basis that new releases I want to play (Skyrim, for instance) will still be around in a couple of years. They'll still be there. I can wait.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that one of the reasons I'm losing enthusiasm for gaming is the rapidity of progress. I don't mean technology exactly, but the common (though certainly far from universal) attitude that there's no point playing a game that's more than a year or two old unless it's old enough to be 'retro'. I've seen even professional reviewers write derisively about the first wave games of this console generation, as though being four years old somehow ruins a game. No one sneered at me buying Super Mario World or A Link to the Past several years after the fact. Hell, no one sneered at me buying an NES during the early SNES era.

This ties into something else that has been troubling me: people moan. People moan so much about every little imperfection. While I certainly agree that lots of games are released in an unfinished state, depending on later patches to fix them, I witness whole armies of gamers whining about the weapon selection in a new FPS or similar minor matters that are essentially just questions of personal preference, and none of them are ever satisfied. What happened to "ok, there are a couple of things that could have been done better, but all this other stuff is really awesome"?

(As an aside, remember that while there is undoubtedly a tendency to release unpolished games, lots of older games contained typos, bugs and various other oddities. I suspect a lot of the time they weren't checked very rigorously.)

There's some truth to all that you just said, I think. Another element of it all is that when we were kids--because of the dynamic you mentioned where there were only a few lead titles across the respective genres--it was easy to be part of the gamer conversation. I could spend two months with Super Mario Bros. 3 and all of my friends were doing the same or would be a few months down the road when they finally got it. Now, if I spend a few months with a game I've just missed 5 or 10 other great games that half my friends were then talking about. I don't have time to stop and savor things because everyone else is already talking about something else. So I force myself to burn through one game after another just so I can still be talking about what's relevant. It's more like work. Things that might mildly annoy me take on a life of their own because suddenly a glitch that sets me back an hour or two is an hour or two where I'm falling behind, not just another hour or two I'm spending with the game.

Suskie: On the other hand, I LOVED Lost Odyssey and that's all anyone needs to know. At least in my mind. I prefer thinking I should be the definitive answer to any "is this game good or not" questions.

Zipp, Sam, Jason: Yeah, what you guys were talking about is a part of why I haven't been reviewing as frequently lately. I've been more into modern games than retro "quickies", so more time is necessary to experience them. Zipp's Chrono Trigger/Persona 3 comparison was perfect. And with these modern games that I truly like, I don't want to necessarily rush through them (I'd do it if it's an assignment...one day I will get back to DQ VIII and do the bonus end-game dungeon...one day...). Like, I should have had Tales of Vesperia finished and reviewed by now...but I like it and wanted to do all the fun optional stuff, so I can get to the Memory Dungeon, get all the cool skills I can and eventually do the 200-man melee in the arena with the former Tales characters as opponents towards the end. And now, I'm near the end, but playing Red Faction Guerrilla as a hopeful precursor to RF Armageddon. I COULD be pretty damn far into the game, but I'm still in Dust (second area, which is very enormous). The reason: despite a laundry list of little annoyances, this game is fun as hell for me. I love blowing things up. I love finding fun ways to sabotage things. I have trouble not destroying anything EDF-related even if it's just a red mark on your map that does nothing but drop control one point. I could blow through the game, doing the bare minimum...but then I might not have had the fun of using a powered-up rocket launcher to take out multiple convoys today...or wielding a walker to kill 60 enemy soldiers...or rocketing a courier to hell, collecting his briefcase and then running like crazy to safety...or even picking a random marked building and turning it to dust for both game purposes and the lulz. This game is a dream in as many ways as it's flawed and I love the experience each night brings me too much to rush through it just to finish it and write about it.

It's just occurred to me that the lack of 'lives' plays a role in the alteration of the way I play games. In modern gaming, having a set number of 'lives' is pretty much redundant, and I have no problem with that. As a side effect, though, I think it encourages long, intense playing sessions. It was easy to play an old game until you ran out of lives, then stop. We don't really have that sort of natural break anymore.

Not a complaint this time, just an observation.

..mm. Dungeon Siege 3 is developed by Obsidian. It's using their own in-house developed engine for once. For the first time, really.. By all accounts, very slick and well done - not just the graphics, but how the camera is used, how the view scales, how it follows players when playing in co-op, etc. ..co-op probably is the biggest draw for me, at least. That's integrated into how the game plays, with funny things like votes on the dialogue choices, and so on. Action seems slow enough to be interesting with teamwork, that kind of thing..

Deus Ex: HR - take a look at PCGamer's preview if you haven't already (click the link on the "diary of a psychopath" to get to the first of three different run-throughs of the same first couple of hours).

For example, I remember that Super Mario World was the leading platformer at roughly the same time that FFIV was the leading RPG and Pilotwings the leading Flight Simulator and Actraiser the leading Action game. You basically picked what genre you liked and there was a game you HAD to play in that genre, and then a series of not-as-good games that you could choose from as they came. You only had to own one system

By owning one system -- the wrong system -- people missed out on the best 16-bit games. The best RPGs (Phantasy Star 4, Lunar 2) and action games (Shinobi 3, Contra Hard Corps) were on Genesis.

If someone wanted to play the whole Splatterhouse series, they had to own both a Turbo and a Genesis. A fan of Valis could play most of the series on either Turbo or Genesis, but had to play episode 4 on SNES. Castlevania had exclusive episodes on every system.

If I wanted to play Mario and Zelda, then I would have had to ask my parents for two systems -- because the system I owned couldn't play either game.

So basically, I disagree with you. The whole "multiple system" thing has subsided. Hot exclusives aren't nearly as common as they were during the 16-bit era. I suspect the difference today is that you want the "other" system and all of the games that come with it, whereas you had no such desire when you were a kid.

//Zig

Zig, you are not wrong. Because of the internet and the ease of advertising to vast groups of people for much cheaper these days, it is far easier to be aware of the games on all three (five? Seven?) systems that exist. This wasn't the case in the days of Sega/Nintendo.

so often one gets on a game related messageboard and sees these posts of "i'm quitting games, games aren't the same, etc etc"..

it definitely helps to be more selective about what you're playing (buying). ideally you'll buy something because you see yourself spending a lot of time with it and enjoying it, not because it's hyped as the next big thing or because you know everyone else will be playing it and talking about it. i game far less than i used to. i'm spending far less money on the hobby than i used to.. but i don't see myself ever saying "screw this FOREVER, IM DONE SON!". there will always be something interesting out there to play, you've just gotta find it.

I don't plan to quit games either, but at the same time I think it's really easy to fall into the trap where you're playing games for the wrong reasons. Playing them because they're hyped or supposed to be fantastic and you don't want to miss out on something like that... even though you otherwise have no particular interest in the game. I've always been less particular about the genre a game must fall in before I will play it--and I still am--but we've reached a point where games are like movies. I don't want to see every movie on every subject just because it's well made; there are too many movies that by that standard are "good" and worth my time. That didn't used to be the case with games so much, but now it is.

Nintendo Magazine System (I liked that title, by the way) used to have a list of every NES, SNES and Game Boy game at the back of selected issues, with a three or four line review and score. Some other magazines had such a list in every single issue.

Can you imagine doing that now? It'd fill half the magazine!

i can't eve imagine reading a videogame magazine now. :D.

i can't even imagine reading a videogame magazine now. :D.

Fair point. They do seem quite redundant these days. Occasionally I'm tempted to buy one just to see how they try to keep up.

I haven't read a games magazine since at least the PS2 days, more likely the PS1 days.

I do occasionally pick one up. They are actually a lot of fun and easier to read then online columns and reports. Printed pictures are still prettier than online pictures, too.

mm. I've.. kind of stopped reading games-magazines as well. They have so much promise, and they look so genuine.. and.. then..

I like games-magazines, not magazine publishers, I guess..

there are really only a couple left in the US anyway, right?

i guess i'd read a games mag if i had a free subscription. used to read EGM like that. i'd feel ripped off it i was paying for it though.

last one i really enjoyed was the indie-Xbox-only mag che chou worked on several years back.. that was good shit. XBM or something? can't remember the name.

i still look through old stacks of Gamefan and Next Generation though, those things were AMAZING. The Gamefans still hold up really well due to the quality of the paper. Almost as slick and shiny as the day i bought them 15 years ago (or whenever that was).

On the topic of games magazines, I realised this morning that when my mum was clearing stuff out of my old bedroom at her house (against my will) she threw away my Nintendo Magazine System special issue, which a quick Google suggests pretty much doesn't exist anywhere in the world.

Not only an anchor for various adolescent memories but also a collector's item, tossed in the bin because my mum is obsessed with getting rid of things that aren't hers.

Grrrrr.