Because I was bored this weekend.
Crackdown (1/1)
It’s New Year’s Day and I’m already cranking out reviews! That’s crazy! This was written for the Alphabetolympics, for which I was obviously assigned the letter “C” and finally had the motivation to review a game I’d played a few months prior. I wound up scoring second place, as I always seem to. This one also won Review of the Week. Off to a good start.
Machinarium (1/2)
One of two instances this year in which I review an adventure game and make it very clear from the get-go how much I loathe the genre. I’m of the opinion that you can do that, occasionally, so long as you put it into context. I have a reason for playing everything I play, and I actually quite enjoyed the Machinarium demo – the game’s look is irresistible and the early puzzles are agreeable enough. But then I downloaded it, and sure enough, it turned into an adventure game, with all kinds of adventure gamey problems.
If anyone wants to know why I hate adventure games, this is the review to read. And I still say it’s impossible to argue against some of these points without sounding like a pretentious buttsore who’s judging Machinarium as an interactive painting first and a game second.
Halo 3: ODST (1/3)
I got this game for Christmas, and when I reviewed it, I tried very hard not to judge it by its value, since I didn’t actually pay for it. I like the conclusion that I came to in the final paragraph.
Infamous (1/3)
Three days into 2010 and I’m already four reviews deep?! Surely I am on my way to winning the Alpha Marathon for the first time! I actually wish I could approach Infamous strictly from the angle of moral choices, since it does everything wrong in that regard, but I actually like Infamous quite a bit, so this is the review that resulted. I did write this blog entry as an extension of the moral choice topic, pulling a specific spoiler-ish example out of the story to demonstrate just how poorly Sucker Punch handled that aspect of the game. Again, though, it’s otherwise a terrific game. This is also another review that won Review of the Week.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (1/10)
My third Review of the Week winner in a row. I don’t really have much else to say about this one.
Borderlands (1/23)
I was one Review of the Week victory away from Total Suskie Domination (i.e. all four slots in the Featured User Reviews sidebar would belong to me), but this is the review that ultimately ended the streak. Looking back, of all the reviews I produced in 2010, this is probably my least-favorite. It’s rambly and meandering and it feels like I’m fumbling for a compelling thesis and only land on one in the final paragraph.
Still, this is one of my most weirdly successful reviews of the year in that it literally convinced Jason to run out and buy the game that night. Seriously. I was talking to him over AIM, and he left for a bit, and when he came back, he said something to the effect of, “Well, I hope you’re happy. I just bought Borderlands.” So I guess I did something right, even if I’m totally at a loss to see what it is. He also nominated it in Jerec’s tournament, so thanks!
Mass Effect 2 (1/28)
I don’t know if my promptness with this review is something I should be proud of or ashamed of. My first playthrough of Mass Effect 2 lasted 25 hours, and I had this review submitted less than three days after the game came out. Hell, I had it done before the game was even released in the UK. I’m insane.
I don’t like either of my Mass Effect reviews, mainly because I adore the series so much and both of my write-ups were rushed efforts that don’t properly convey what it is I love about these games. But eh, whatever.
Bionic Commando (2/6)
Philly was hit with a few nasty snowstorms early this particular semester, and Michael Nutter basically ordered a city-wide shutdown on a couple of occasions. So I spent one of my weeknights playing through this game in one sitting, and then I wrote up a review the following day when I didn’t have classes. Good times. The review itself is thoroughly average as far as I’m concerned.
Demon's Souls (2/13)
Man, fuck this game. Seriously. And you know, what’s really frustrating is that Demon’s Souls handles certain elements (like the standalone combat) extremely well, so I can’t just take a stand and say that the game’s mentality is evil and that the people who defend it are trying to compensate for something. Though they are. (By the way, here’s another Review of the Week winner.)
Ninja Gaiden II (2/14)
I rented this game hoping it would be cured of the camera issues that made its Xbox predecessor so unplayable. Whoops.
BioShock 2 (2/18)
I like it when one of my reviews expresses an opinion that not many people hold. Gives me an automatic leg up. I don’t like BioShock all that much and I thought the sequel was an improvement in nearly every way. I get people thinking it’s just an uninspired rehash, but I’m surprised how many fans of the first game genuinely hated the second one. Is 2010 the year that BioShock fans finally figured out how mediocre the first game was? Strip away the appeal of exploring Rapture for the first time and it’s really not that great. The only thing the sequel lacked was the element of newness, and for that, people despised it. This review more or less covers both games, but I’m happy with what I came up with, which won Review of the Week and ranked second in the Challange… thing.
Heavy Rain (3/31)
I really, seriously didn’t play Heavy Rain expecting and hoping to hate it, so when I did play it and did hate it, I had to approach my review in the most level-headed manner possible. Much like my Machinarium write-up, this doubles as a review of Heavy Rain and a rant on the inherent flaws of the adventure genre as a whole. Quantic Dream, if you guys want to make movies, then make movies. Shoehorning button prompts and a few alternate endings in doesn’t make it a video game.
The rather lengthy feedback topic that spawned is worth reading, if only because it clarifies a couple of points that Zipp inevitably tried to argue against. He actually brought up something I wasn’t aware of, but I explain therein why it didn’t change my perspective on the game or the review. Incredibly, I won Review of the Week for this… when Zipp was judging. He did not enjoy awarding me that one, no sir.
God of War III (4/7)
I feel like I spent too much of this review complaining, but most people are well aware of what the God of War series does well, so I wanted to spend some time explaining what it doesn’t do so well. Still a great game.
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction (4/19)
I bought this on a whim and it wound up being one of my favorite games of the year. I also happened to have a roommate who was also really into Splinter Cell, and we wound up having a great time with Conviction’s co-op mode. Got this review done within a week of the game’s release and I’m reasonably happy with it.
Just Cause 2 (4/24)
This one was a story. The number of times each year in which Jason offers a freelance assignment I’m genuinely interested in could easily be counted on one hand. So, when I do want a game he’s offering, I’m incredibly persuasive about it. I really wanted to play Just Cause 2 and wrote up a passionate, lengthy essay on why I’m the perfect candidate, pointing to several sandbox reviews of mine that had received accolades. Not only did he not send me the game, but he actually sent me an e-mail for the sole purpose of telling me that someone else was getting it. So I opened my inbox, saw I’d received a response from Jason, got all excited, and was then devastated. Go fuck yourself in the face, Jason.
I wound up renting Just Cause 2 several times in a row immediately thereafter, played the hell out of it for a week or two, and produced this review. My mission, ultimately, was to write something better than whatever the assigned freelancer churned out, just to make Jason hate himself. I never actually received any feedback from him on this review, but I consider myself successful; of all the reviews I wrote in 2010, this is my favorite. I also got it done before Louis Bedigian finished his, which is hilarious. Also, OD awarded this one Review of the Week. Thanks, man. I only recently wound up actually buying Just Cause 2, which I wouldn’t have had to do if I’d gotten the game as a freelance assignment. Fuck.
Final Fantasy XIII (5/1)
This is a weird one. I can’t deny that I enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII, but at the same time, I find myself sympathizing more with people who hate it. The conclusion that I came up with – FFXIII is all about combat, and the combat works – is one derived more from logic than emotion, and most of my feelings toward the game are negative. You know the crazy thing, though? After I finished FFXIII, I started seeing ATB meters as I tried to go to sleep at night. And any game that can inflict me with Tetris Blocks Syndrome is clearly doing something right.
Jerec awarded this one Review of the Week, but there were only three reviews submitted that week and he really didn’t like the other two, so it was determined that this particular victory didn’t count. Ah well.
Metroid Prime Trilogy (5/4)
Compilation reviews can be tricky to write, but in the case of Metroid Prime Trilogy, I actually had a great time reviewing the series rather than any particular game. I also, for the first time, properly conveyed what exactly I loved to so about the first one, which worked as a segue into what I didn’t like about the sequels.
Borderlands Double Game Add-On Pack (5/6)
Remember how Jason found my Borderlands review scary convincing? Well, he actually PMed me saying he’d obtained the expansion disc for the game and that it was mine if I wanted it. Unbeknownst to him, my roommate already had the disc, and we’d been playing the DLC incessantly at the time. So I said I’d be happy to review it, but that sending me the game wasn’t necessary. So there you go.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (5/9)
I rented this mostly so I’d have an X game to review for the Alpha Marathon, but I actually had a surprisingly good time with it. Four bucks and eight hours well-spent.
Left 4 Dead (5/11)
I’d originally planned to review Dead Space for the horror contest, but the game wasn’t fresh enough in my mind and I wasn’t about to rent it again just to review it. Thankfully, my roommate and I had been chugging through the L4D games at the time, and that sort of fit, even though they’re more action-centric than what you’d typically associate with horror games. I like the review that I came up with, and it scored rather well in the contest. Except from Zipp.
Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition (5/14)
I’d had an interest in Zeno Clash for a while but couldn’t play the PC version because my laptop blows. I excitedly snapped up an opportunity to do a freelance review for the Xbox version, and then a week later, I’d more or less forgotten I’d even played it. Very underwhelming.
Pokemon: SoulSilver Version (5/24)
The most meta review I wrote this year in that it’s not really a review so much as an evaluation of Nintendo’s ongoing strategy with this series. Everyone knows about Pokemon by now and a straight-up review would have been boring; instead, I greatly enjoyed writing this opinion piece thing.
Alan Wake (5/31)
I still consider Alan Wake one of the year’s most pleasant surprises – not just that I loved it, but that I enjoyed it for different reasons than I was expecting. The story was largely irrelevant, but the combat was satisfyingly crunchy and the atmosphere was superb. I consider this one of my better 2010 reviews.
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (6/12)
So people didn’t like the reboot, and now the series’ return to form is an uninspired rehash. You guys are impossible to please, you know that?
Alpha Protocol (6/21)
More or less my biggest reviewing success of 2010. Firstly, this was a freelance assignment for a game I really wanted to play but didn’t want to gamble on by buying it, what with all of the negative reviews. Secondly, the resulting review, which conveyed my torturously conflicted feelings toward the game, actually convinced at least two people to buy it, and Ben actually wound up liking the game more than I did. Zig actually did bring up a good criticism regarding my description of the story when judging this for TT, though, and now I’m powerless to edit it. Oh well. For what the game does wrong, I’m glad I had the opportunity to play it and share my opinion about it.
Dante's Inferno (7/3)
I was going to review this for TT, but then Asherdeus wound up doing exactly that and I didn’t want to bore the judges. But then True requested that I review it anyway, so I did. All for you, buddy!
Whether or not this review is any good isn’t for me to say, but I liked the heavily analytical angle I approached it from – I was an English major at the time and I’ve read the poem, so I decided to get a little pretentious about it in spots. This write-up is a rather important benchmark for me, because it resulted in Ben awarding me my 25th Review of the Week win, making me the only person to unlock the RotW Warlock milestone, which I felt understandably proud of. It was during a very competitive week, too.
Super Mario Galaxy (7/8)
For most of last year’s TT, I dipped into my backlog. Super Mario Galaxy was the only review I wrote specifically for the tournament, and it was also, ironically, the only review to lose. I’d actually spent a great deal of time working on it and was completely confident that it would win, even against as formidable an opponent as Leroux. I was shocked, angry and befuddled when it didn’t. I was initially a sore loser about it, and I took out my anger on my teammates at the time, which wasn’t cool.
I calmed down pretty quickly, but I also took up the opinion that the judging panel sucked, which I never retracted. I decided that TT was no longer worth my time and that I was going to rely on my backlog for the remainder of the tournament. The trouble was that everyone, to the very end of the tournament, thought I was still being a sore loser, even when I wound up only losing one round. And I couldn’t correct anyone, because I didn’t want to sway the judges’ results by publicly calling them out.
Funny thing was, I was totally content to just sit back, prop up my feet and let everyone else have their fun while TT more or less sailed on without me, but everyone else’s unwillingness to accept that fact that I’d lost interest spawned an uncomfortable amount of heat that started when Leroux posted a message publicly chewing me out. My breaking point came when our team actually pulled to first place, I made a joke about how my indifference was helping us, and it got deleted. I wound up unapologetically losing my temper with at least four individual people.
But anyway. The rather heartwarming ending to this story is that despite the anger this review ultimately spawned between myself and Leroux, the man recently nominated it in Jerec’s Review of the Year tournament, which, all things considered, is pretty fucking awesome of him. It also scored a Review of the Week win, so that’s cool.
By the way, our team wound up winning TT. Which is hilarious.
Alien Swarm (7/25)
This game was a Valve-published free download over Steam. It was popular, yet only one website that I’m aware of had actually reviewed it. I told Jason that if he added it to the database, I’d write up a staff review for it, which would hopefully attract some traffic. To date, it’s one of only four reviews linked on GameRankings and has tallied over 1300 hits. Not bad.
Mass Effect 2: Lair of the Shadow Broker (9/9)
My first contribution for Gameroni was fittingly for a downloadable mission that I couldn’t formally review here. I never get sick of talking about Mass Effect (as you all know) so this was a pleasant experience for me. Great DLC.
Halo: Reach (9/16)
I churned out this review within a few days of the game’s release, when I’d beaten the campaign but only had a little experience with the multiplayer, which I’d been only mildly interested in, anyway. I’ve since become totally engrossed in Reach’s online component, so this review is an outdated summary of my feelings toward this game, really. I still plan to eventually write up a review for HG that covers the game’s multiplayer, so stay tuned, maybe.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (10/16)
This was another one of those cases where I went to Jason and said, “Hey, I’m about to review this relatively new game, so do you need a review for either HG or Gameroni?” He said he didn’t have a particular need for it over on Gameroni and pointed out that after I blew a gasket in the forums trying to beat the game on the highest difficulty, a few people here probably wanted to hear the conclusion to this particular story. This was a weird review to write, too, if only because I had so many individual complaints about the game but still wound up recommending it. The review won RotW, at least.
Also, I submitted this for True’s Dark Contest Thing and broke my habit of always placing second by… placing third! Except True was actually awarding wins to the two highest-scoring participants, so as it turns out, I actually did place second. Well, shit.
Medal of Honor (10/20)
I spent the majority of this review explaining why Medal of Honor doesn’t even touch Call of Duty. Ironically, the game wound up having a better campaign than Black Ops, though that’s not much of an accomplishment. Still, Medal of Honor’s multiplayer is a pile of decomposing scrotums.
Singularity (11/2)
I suspect most people weren’t expecting the conclusion that I came to at the end of the review, where I spent the length of the thing complaining and then saying, “Wait, this game is totally better than BioShock.” Of course, I didn’t really like BioShock, but there you go.
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (11/23)
I don’t have anything to say about this one.
Killzone 2 (11/30)
Did any of you read this? I don’t think any of you read this.
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