Starcraft 2, Mass Effect 2, Minecraft, Company of Heroes Online, Alien Swarm, Fallout: New Vegas.
There have been some dry spells in the video gaming world. And were there was once innovation at every turn, we started working backwards. As gaming left the hands of talented individuals and became the domain of large corporations, suddenly innovation became an unacceptable risk. Good games became rare, and really revolutionary games became few and far between. I’m not sure what happened, but recently there’s been a flood of amazing games, I can barely keep up. Some from small developers who can still do whatever they want, some from the few companies that have never lost sight of how important creative new ideas are, and some that are just old safe ideas refined and combined beyond the sum of their parts. Each of these games are relatively new, at the top of their genre, and by far, worth playing.
1. MineCraft
Price: 14.95 pounds (about $24)
Apparently, there’s some kind of super genius living in Sweden who just decided to invent a new genre of game and make it himself. It’s an old-school graphics styled exploring and world building survival horror game. There’s a pretty good description of how the game plays titled “Mine the Gap.”
This game has me quite captivated. I started just trying to live in a hole in the side of a mountain long enough to figure out what I’m doing, and now I’ve built several small castles and towers. The more you build the more ideas you come up with for crazy things to build. It’s a bit like the Sims in that the game doesn’t give you any goals, so you just make up your own. Game designers once thought that they had to tell the player what to do, “You have to save the president” or something like that. Eventually they learned they can just give you a bunch of tools to do anything and player will look at the empty world and say “So I can do whatever I want? Oh score! I’m building myself a tree-house and a spaceship!”
Of course in the Sims, you don’t have to worry about the zombies at night. At some times this game can be absolutely terrifying. Some games spend millions of dollars getting the most realistic blood dripping zombie animations. This game can put you in a state of primal terror using some really blocky monsters and less than subtle sound effects. Nothing is more terrifying than accidentally tunneling into an underground cavern filled with spiders.
The multiplayer is even more unfinished than the rest of the game, but is still amazing. I’ve spent hours on my favorite server building my house and a castle in the sky, and I built an underground workshop below my house and accidentally tunneled into an underground city some people were building. I’ve worked cooperatively building some amazing structures with fun people, and I’ve also had the joy of logging on one day to find that someone has come during the night and burned most of the city down, or cut holes through all my structures and then built a random tower of blocks out of my house! On a particularly anarchy disposed server, I even got so mad at people who were breaking into my house and stealing my supplies, I booby a large area near my house with underground dynamite that explodes when anyone steps on the hidden pressure-plates.
I’ve always loved games that involve productivity. Everything from X-Com’s management side, to the crafting in MMOs. This game really opens that up in an amazing new way, and who knows what’s still to come. Because it’s not even done yet, it’s only in beta, and it’s already making millions of dollars.
Go help it make a few more, you can thank me later.
2. StarCraft II
Price: $50 (double that if you’re the type of person who doesn’t need me to tell you to buy it and you already got the collectors edition with all the cool extra stuff!)
This is a highly realistic screenshot from the actual game.
Do I really need to say much? I’m sure everyone is already quite familiar with the world’s favorite real-time strategy game. This time it’s even better. Every few RTS games hass a mission or two that’s the really clever amazing mission, the one that everyone remembers and imitates. Somehow, every singleplayer mission in Starcraft II is that mission. They’re all the amazing memorable ones. Oh yeah, also, right now as your read this, a ton of people are having some seriously awesome Starcraft II multiplayer games. And it’s got a good system for matching you up with people of your own skill level.
What? Why is that?
But really, all I should need to say is: It’s freaking Starcraft!
Price: $15-60 (This one’s all over the place)
The first Mass Effect game was fun, but I got tired of it pretty quickly. Mass Effect 2 is a much more impressive game. There’s no one single thing about Mass Effect 2 that makes it better than the first. The story is more interesting. The characters feel more lifelike. The combat is more fun. Everything just works much better. This is an amazing game.
The game industry has always looked up to the film industry. In trying to emulate the production value of a Hollywood movie, some games far exceed it. Mass Effect 2 is an amazing refinement of video game story telling. You no longer make some choices then watch a scene. Now, conversation options and the action have been combined into interactive cinematics, making you feel like you are in control of a character in a movie. The voice acting is really stellar, which is sometimes hit or miss in video games. Oddly enough, the game industry is often very casual about having some big names acting in games. Mass Effect 2′s cast includes Martin Sheen, Seth Green, Carrie-Ann Moss, Tricia Helfer, Michael Hogan, Yvonne Strahovski, and Adam Baldwin.
Look familiar? That's right, this is Martin Sheen's character!
All of my complaints about the first game don’t apply here. Instead of the inventory consisting of hundreds of nearly identical unmanageable items, you’ve either discovered a certain level of weapon or not. Levels are now more condensed, and there’s no more hour long running across massive empty maps for no reason.
Really, I could go on for much longer, but you should just play the demo!
Price: Free! (But with the option to buy additional perks, ($9 for steam retail)
Company of Heroes was a game sold several years ago, it’s a World War II real-time Strategy Game. Most RTS games match a very specific formula that requires a somewhat futuristic setting in order to explain the technology necessary for the complexity of the gameplay. Company of Heroes somehow managed to perfect both gameplay and WWII historical accuracy. Granted I’m sure they took a few liberties with the history, but If I can’t figure out what they were, they’re subtle enough. And the gameplay has earned this game some of the highest praise of all time for any RTS game.
But now, this award winning favorite is being brought online for free, in a sort of Farmville business model fashion. Instead of buying the game for $50, now it’s free, and the singleplayer campaign is free, but you can buy extra “episodes” which would mean additional singleplayer missions. In addition to that. The multiplayer games allow you to use bonuses that add to or strengthen your army. You can give your construction engineers flamethrowers, or add more armor to your tanks. You can decrease the time it takes to order an air-strike, or hire an elite team of snipers. These bonuses run out, and can be replenished with points that you earn from playing single or multiplayer games, or by spending real money on them. But you can have plenty of fun without spending a penny. And I encourage you to do so!
Update: during the time when I started putting together this post, they’ve announced the end of the beta with indefinite plans for release, with the exception of the existing retail versions of this game. If you want to play the free beta, you have until 03/31/11.
5. Alien Swarm
Price: Free!
Valve software is an amazing company. They made this free game just so they could show you how good their games are and how good “Steam”, their digital content delivery system is. There’s no cost at all, now or later, for what they easily could have charged plenty of money for. Alien Swarm is an amazing fully polished game that immediately dominates all competition in the genre is helps establish. It’s a top-down team co-op shooter with a strong likeness to the film “Aliens.”
This game sticks you in the middle of a story with 3 other players, each choosing roles such as medic and tech, and giving you a choice of weapons and tools. Some players might pick up a mini-gun and a flamethrower, grab some extra ammo and some hand grenades, and just start blowing things up. While others can go a more tactical route, with sniper rifles, auto-aiming tesla cannons, welding kits to seal doors behind them, and night vision goggles. This game is an exciting way to spend a few hours, and the more time you put in, the more equipment you unlock.
For free, this game’s a pretty good deal already, but Valve software really is a step above almost everyone else, so of course, the also released the full source code to the game as well as the sdk and dev kit needed to make your own levels and mods. Sigh, why couldn’t all game companies be like Valve… Anyway, awesome game. Go get it!
Price: $50
I grew up playing Fallout and Fallout 2, literally. I spent a lot of my childhood playing those games over and over. Some kids played baseball, I played Fallout. I must have finished them more times than I’ve finished all other games combined. What I’m trying to get at here is, the original Fallout series consists of the two best games of all time, and I love them. So you might think that because of that, I’ll automatically like Fallout 3 and now, Fallout: New Vegas. NO! That’s not how it works! The more you like something classic, the more painful it is to see it remade. So when I judge Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I’m judging it against my rose-colored memories of a very tough act to follow. That being said: Fallout: New Vegas is a really good game.
Fallout 3 did a great job reviving the series, considering it was made by different people from the original games. They brought life back to the nuclear wasteland and combined all the charm of the original fallout’s interface and mechanics with all the technology of modern games. There were some things lacking, the story and dialog never lived up to the wild, dynamic, and humorous conversations of the original Fallout games. Fallout 3 lacked a lot of the strange choices and complexities of the first games. While in Fallout 1 & 2 there were many options for dealing with issues, most of which had unclear outcomes and some murky morals, Fallout 3 had a somewhat predictable good or evil binary choice for most quests. But for what fallout 3 lacked in dynamic story, it made up for in action and adventure. The world of fallout 3 was rich in discoveries and firefights. It’s a wonderful game.
Fallout: New Vegas, by comparison, was made by a company comprised of many of the original people who worked on Fallout 1 & 2. Which is how the game has managed to reclaim some of the dynamic story that feels less like a series of quests each with a good and evil choice, and more like the real world with difficult to predict consequences. Doing a nice thing for someone might lead to a bad result. Doing a bad thing might benefit someone good. Though very similar to Fallout 3, the world of fallout: New Vegas is a complex and gritty masterpiece, with story that far surpasses the simplicity of Fallout 3′s writing.
Fallout 3 also had some of the worst voice acting of all time. Sure, there were a few top notch actors playing good parts, but most of the voices were just wrong. Either bad actors or miscast. There was one voice actor who sounded like a movie trailer guy or radio announcer, who for some reason was doing voices for every ghoul, homeless, sickly, or dying character. Fallout: New Vegas however, has some great voice acting, not only does the casting feel perfect, but the list of people they got for the game is like a who’s who of geeky favorites or vegas/pop-culture references. The cast includes Zachary Levi, Felicia Day, Kris Kristofferson, Wil Wheaton, Michael Hogan, Dave Foley, Danny Trejo, Rene Auberjonois, Matthew Perry, and even Wayne Newton!
One particular issue I have with the game however, is that in Fallout 3, you could wander endlessly, discovering weird and funny things in the wasteland, somehow every pile of junk and every burned down shack told a little story. The past and the present came alive through the map design, and you could wander into a strange situation which you suddenly had to deal with, even dropping you into the middle of a quest just for wandering somewhere. Somehow, the creators of Fallout: New Vegas broke all that. The wasteland is still interesting, sure. But you don’t run into quite so many random oddities, and exploring where you shouldn’t actually breaks things. Go into a building before you had the quest to do it? Stuff won’t work right. Did a quest before another quest you didn’t know about? Broke the other quest. Wander around aimlessly? That will probably ruin some other quests too. This was never an issue in any of the previous fallout games. And I really hate that I’ll ever be fearful of exploring in a Fallout game.
The other big issue for me, was that the world is a bit too peaceful. I know that sounds like a good thing. But in a game where you’re carrying around a small armory, you would think they would give you a few more enemies. New Vegas introduces a new system of factions, each with reputation. Instead of just an overall karma system, you can make friends or enemies with individual towns, military groups, or religious organizations. It’s a great idea, but it seems to me, that if you’re trying to be a nice guy, it’s just too easy to be friends with everyone. That sort of a thing wasn’t a problem in Fallout 3. You could be as friendly as you wanted, and Mutant monsters and raiders would still fight you no matter what. In New Vegas, I think I actually broke part of the game just by picking fights instead of questing with what I thought were some of the worst factions in the game. Though there is still plenty of fighting, a lot of the game gives you the ability to hoard weapons that you might find yourself looking for excuses to use. As opposed to the survival struggle in Fallout 3 where the world was always trying to kill you and you had to struggle to have enough guns and bullets to stay alive.
That being said. This has instantly become one of my favorite games of all time, and quite worthy the Fallout series. If you only play one 50′s futurist post-apocalyptic role playing game, make it Fallout: New Vegas.
