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!

3. Mass Effect 2

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!

4. Company of Heroes Online

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!

5. Fallout: New Vegas

That's Felicia Day's character on the right!

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.

12 Year Old Tough Guy
These are the names a young child might mistake for tough:

KillerKiller25
AceViperSnake
TerrorShooter
AwesomeWinTheBest312
LightningOfDarkness

Lazy Names
Then there’s people who don’t care about names, but the game won’t let them continue till they put text in the box:

asdfasdf
llolololol
pppppppppp

Overcomplicated “Logos”
Then there’s people who put way to much effort into what is supposed to be just a name.

..xxBARO—NESSxx..
*S*T*A*R* -I-N-V-A-D-E-R- 2000
***.,-/ Spider \-,..,-/ Man \-,..,-/ From \-,..,-/ Space \-,.***

Fantasy Names
Then there’s fantasy players who forgot that grammar itself can never be fiction. Though sometimes these are actually ‘Lazy names’ masquerading as those with thought behind them.

Elu’el’et’tix’rabal
shaleanoerealealaelical
trxpklnikrbm

Confidence Issues
Some players have confidence issues, they don’t want to be blamed for doing anything wrong, so they name their character in such a way that they’re always saying “told you so” when they screw up. That way, they never did anything wrong, the just lived up to their name. IT’S FAILPROOF. Speaking of fail:

FailAtThis
ISuckAtMyGuy
DontKnowWhatThisButtonDoes
HasNoSkill

5. Not allowing people to play the game after they buy it.

This might sound silly but it’s true. Sometimes, you buy a game and then they don’t let you play it! In efforts to prevent piracy, game companies will put all sorts of locks and controls in their game. They add a series of hoops the user has to jump through, with passwords, online authentication, disc checking, serial numbers, etc… The problem is, that much like a car, the lock only prevent it from being stolen the first time, after that, the theives can remove the lock or make their own keys. Unlike cars, they only need to steal one copy, after that they can make all the copies they want. Then you have your paying customers having trouble playing the game because their serial number is missing a digit or the authentication servers crashed and the only people playing the game are the ones who stole it. Good job game companies! Good job!

"Put the game down, and show me your reciept! Ok, what's your serial number? You wait here I'm going to go check this out and make sure you're telling me the truth."

4. Copying the market without innovation or spirit.

This might sound obvious, but it’s still very common. Let’s say you’re a designer or an executive at a game company, and you are creating ideas for the next game your company will make. You could look at existing games and all the games that made money. Then take ideas from all of them, and create a game about a tough soldier who is tough and smokes cigars and blows up buildings while saying cool things and drives a hovercraft with a machine gun in the future with aliens who have flamethrowers. It could have realistic physics and photorealistic graphics and big hollywood voice actors! WOW! Sadly, that sort of idea is common and will probably end up in a bargin bin. Everyone wants to make the next big shooter or the next big racing game, but they only end up copying all the others.

Games like Half-Life and The Sims are successful because of their innovation and the refined game design experience. A Copy of The Sims or Half-Life won’t be that same success because people already have The Sims and are smart enough not to buy a second rate knockoff! For every good game that is sold, there’s 20 just like it that no one wants.

Because the first two mall tycoon games were just so close to gaming perfection!

3. Assuming everyone but you is stupid and making games fit for toddlers.

Children’s games are not a huge market. Young kids all want to play the games the older kids are playing. So why are so many games still designed assuming the players are three years old? Spore would have been a fantastic game were it not designed with the gameplay difficulty of a kindergarten lunchtime game. The game designers spoke of choosing a game for the masses rather some elite few they assumed that only they were a part of. Forgetting that the game playing masses learned how to play ‘Simon says’ when they were 3 and then spent another 20 years outgrowing that. Over the years, games have been getting both simpler and easier to compensate for the larger audience they’re trying to attract, but they forget that the difficulty curve is called a curve for a reason. And that while an easier start to a game will attract more players, they’ll get bored fast if the game doesn’t get more interesting from there.

On a more serious note, despite the problems with the gameplay in spore, the game is still awesome, I mean, look at that! Someone made that!

2. Pretending the past 20 years never happened.

Sometimes people sit down and say “We need to make a game for this movie about a fast-talking stockbroker! How about a 2D platform shooter where you shoot at aliens!” There have been a number of advances in how games are designed and played, and every now and then a game comes along that forgets about all that. Deciding to simply apply their game concept to simple game templates that were established in the 80′s. There’s nothing wrong with the way things were done, but many game designers don’t choose to use an old style, it’s all they know. At the same time, you have people who think like this, and then they notice the state of modern video game graphics, and it looks so amazing to them, they sort of forget there needs to be anything more then graphics and polycounts.

Because it's hard to come up with ideas for what superman could do in a game!

1. Forgetting to play the game after you make it.

You would think that after you make a game, you would try playing it to see if it’s fun and if it has any problems. Sometimes I get the feeling that some game designers skip that step. When a game requires you play a 20-minute tutorial each time you start the game over, you really don’t want to play that game more then once. Black & White is an amazing game, but it forces me to spend at least 10 minutes learning the camera and mouse controls, even if I already know them! Is it that hard to put in an “I already know how to click on stuff let me play the game now!” Button? When a game requires you to watch a 4 minute cutscene before a really hard boss fight, and each time you die you have to watch the unskippable cutscene over and over, you get the feeling the game designers didn’t try to play the game after they made it. Some games are just no fun to play. You would think they would have caught those early on too! Some games don’t even run, and have massive bugs that prevent you from playing them, again, something they would have found if they actually played it after they made it. Game designers often say, perhaps jokingly, “We hope you have as much fun playing our game as we had making it!” The sad truth in that statement is that some game designers have a a lot of fun making something, but they don’t save any of the fun for the person playing it.

Because that last paragraph is more important than all the other rules, I’ll sum it up again, Game designers take heed: Step 1, make game. Step 2, play game. Step 3, if game is not perfect, go back to step 1. I understand that a lot of large companies are under financial pressure to release on schedule and that you don’t want to spend forever on a stagnant project. But that’s no excuse to break the rules mentioned above, you know, unless you want to make bad games!

This. If you see this, the game is not done yet.

The Playstation 3! They might make some games for it someday too!

Right now DVDs are very popular, having replaced VHS. The advantages were clear, and the cost, size, and increased storage capacity meant that people could not only own movies at home, but entire TV shows as well. This DVD party went on for a long time and fun was had by all. Now people can buy a TV that is capable of showing higher quality images than DVDs can provide. Which leaves consumers two decisions: Do I buy the more expensive TV for the higher quality picture? And do I go and pay extra for HD content? Many people do not, in fact, do either of those. I’ve heard only 10% of people own an HD capable TV. And of the people I know who have HDTVs, very few have anything more than a DVD player.

Hold up a 24 television episodes on 11 VHS tapes and hold up a small DVD case that holds 24 episodes on 5 DVDs and anyone can point out a difference. But if you compare HD and SD, most people can’t see the difference. I’m normally the one who is all upset when people are watching a 4×3 picture stretched to fill a 16×9 screen (“Sorry if I’m the only one who can tell HIS HEAD IS TWICE AS WIDE AS IT SHOULD BE!”) But the simple truth is that to many people, HD is exactly the same.

Apple TV, Just like iTunes, but for $350 more!

To me, HD is not the same, it looks a lot better. I got myself a PS3 and I would much rather buy movies and TV shows on Blu-Ray than DVD if given the option. I buy a lot of movies and TV shows, but if I’m the only one doing it, I doubt I alone can lead Blu-Ray on to financial success. I mean, some people really liked beta-max, HD DVD, Orbitz drinks, and pogs. And you don’t see a lot of those around anymore. I suspect that HD will always be a smaller market. Because there are people living in the ass end of nowhere that just got themselves DVD players for their TVs who probably think “HD” is someones cousin and a “Blu-Ray” is something in the ocean that can sting you. For many people DVDs actually improved everything by making movies and TV shows more accessible. Whereas Blu-Ray lets them see the actor’s acne better if they walk up to the screen.

I know I know, that remote has way too many buttons!

Blu-Ray players are expensive, like $400 on average. Then there’s the cost of the discs. MP3′s bought online are quickly replacing CDs sold in stores. So why not the same for movies? When you can download a movie or watch it online, why would people shell out the money for expensive players and discs? I’ll tell you why! Remember the guy living in the ass end of nowhere? Let’s say they know what HD is and they want it. They could go buy a Blu-Ray player, and rent the discs from netflix or the local rental store. Or they could go the VOD route, and choose between iTunes, Netflix Instant viewing, Amazon Unbox, Hulu, Vudu, AT&T U-Verse, Time Warner On-Demand, XBOX Live Marketplace, Playstation Store, Joost, Verizon FiOS, etc… And people thought HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray was scary! There’s a lot someone would need to know about those services. Do they have a lot of movies? or only some? Do they have TV show episodes? Do they have HD content? is all of it available in HD? Do I need to buy special hardware? Do I pay per movie? per month? What kind of DRM does it have? Do I have to watch it on my computer or can I connect it to my TV? If I picked a service that goes out of business do I get to keep the movies I paid for? Let’s say the guy in the ass end of nowhere decides on one of the many On-Demand services above, it probably wouldn’t work over dial-up. They quite simply don’t offer broadband internet in many areas yet.

WTF is this thing?

If I buy a Blu-Ray disc. I’m getting up to 50 gigabytes of information. I don’t want to buy the hard drives it would take to store that much data, and I don’t want to have to use an internet connection each time i want to watch a movie. The internet can be unreliable and/or slow. So for me Blu-Ray is the clear option. For most people, DVDs are the only think that matters, and everything else is a niche market. I would predict that On-Demand will one day win out, but it’s going to take a lot longer then most people think as it will require technology where downloading and storing 50 GB files was as nonchalant as downloading an MP3. And until that happens there will be plenty of business for Blu-Ray.

But by then of course, maybe everyone will just be pirating everything because of all the DRM anyway.

I’ve heard bioshock was a really good game, so got it earlier today. I would say I can’t wait to try it, but I actually have to. After I got the game I found out it requires an internet connection to “activate” the game. Additionally, you can only install the game twice, if you reformat your computer, change hardware, or get a new computer more than once, you could be forced to buy the game again in order to play it. Ok, I’m lucky enough to have an internet connection, and I figure I can deal with the activation system, so try to install the game. After 20 minutes it tries to download a patch, fails, and deletes the game that just took 20 minutes to install. As it turns out, the activation server is down, meaning I cannot install the game till it comes back up. The game I bought. In a store.

What if, instead of spending money to get the game, I had illegally downloaded the game, along with a crack for the copy protection. I would be playing the game right now. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. I’ve had to jump through all sorts of hoops to install software. Command and Conquer: the First decade collection requires you enter 7 different 20 digit serial codes to activate all the games. Half-life 2 requires that your computer decrypt data after installing it, a mathmatical process which makes the installation for the game take over 6 hours, you also have to connect to the internet every time you want to start the game. UFO: Aftershock, as well as many other games, install “Starforce” a form of copy protection that crashes computers even when the game is not being used and can allegedly cause physical damage to a computer’s cd-rom drive. Uplink requires that you type in special codes that are provided on a black piece of paper, printed in black letters. You have to catch it in the light just right to read it.

And what about the pirated versions of these programs? The pirated versions require no decrytion, they don’t install any copy protection software, you don’t have to connect to the internet to use them, and you don’t even have to put a CD in the computer to play the game. You can run them all from your hard drive. What service! I’de almost pay extra for that, no wait, I paid for the broken versions, the good versions are free?

I understand why the publishers and game companies do this, they are afraid people will download and copy the games instead of buying them. It would seem to make sense that you should take steps to protect things you make. But what many companies seem to not notice, is that putting these hassles and roadblocks in the retail versions of the game punishes only the people who buy them. It only takes one clever programmer to make a working pirated version of any software, and then the only people who are punished are those who don’t steal the game.

Buy the game and it doesn’t work. Steal the game and it works. Buy the game and the game takes 8 hours to install. Steal the game and it doesn’t need to install, it works instantly without the CD. Would pavlov’s dog keep buying games like many of us still do? I plan to keep buying the games, but if it doesn’t work after I do. I could always play a pirated version instead. Eventually one of two things will happen. They’ll stop breaking my games, or I’ll learn to stop paying for them.