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We are in the time of lists. At the transition point from year to year it’s customary to create lists. The best of, the worst of. The things that are memorable from the year gone by. A ranked index of towering works.
I don’t plan on doing that. While we are closing out a year, we are also closing out a decade, and as far as video games are concerned maybe the best decade on record. Instead of making a “best of” list, I have written a completely unordered grab bag of games that I have enjoyed over the last 10 years. There were a lot of other games that I played and thought were great. This is far from comprehensive, but if you were looking for a good game to play, I don’t think you can go wrong with any of the bunch below. I’ll probably cover some of these games in longer Best Games pieces in the future, but I will keep the raving to a minimum here. I’ll limit the commentary to why these games were important to me. Lets Go! The Legend of Zelda : A Link Between Worlds I played most of this game laying in bed waiting for one kid or another to wake up. It was a salve for the tension of not really sleeping a full night for a few years straight. Aside from that personal bit of nostalgia it was just a solid game. It’s like they were in the middle of a remake of Link to the Past and decided instead to go in a whole new direction. It feels classic and timeless in all the ways that you would want. Portal 2 I played through the entirety of the co-op mode of Portal 2 with my oldest son. He would have been around 4. Sometimes it took a few tries to get through a particularly tricky puzzle that required accurate timing, but we did it. Now he plays Doom Eternal on Nightmare, so that early practice must have stuck. We still sometimes talk about the lemons. Metal Gear Solid V : The Phantom Pain I Don’t think I have played a single game for as many hours as I did with Metal Gear Solid V. I played every mission. Every mission. Side stuff. Stuff you didn’t need to do. Stuff that didn’t matter. I ran every one of those missions multiple times. I think it was the freedom. You could literally approach most of the missions in that game from any direction with any equipment. You could sneak, you could shoot, you could use the games systems against it. I didn’t think we would ever see such an intricate framework of systems so expertly implemented. I hope there are more games like it. Bloodstained : Ritual of the Night There have been a lot of games that purported to be the spiritual successor to Castlevania Symphony of the night, but I think only Bloodstained : Ritual of the Night can truly claim that crown. It takes everything in Symphony and extends it, expands it, reworks it into a fully modern game that plays like you remember Symphony playing like without just aping a game that came out on the first playstation. Mass Effect 2 and 3 The first Mass Effect game came out in 2007 and I won the 360 version of it in a giveaway at a microsoft game developers meetup sometime early in 2008. I don’t think that I actually had a 360 to play it on until sometime in 2009. It is possible that I played that entire series this past decade, but I don’t really remember. Still, if I could only include the second and third entry of the Mass Effect series, that would be good enough. Mass Effect kept me up late when I really needed the sleep. There are characters and moments in that series that I will hold with me for as long as I possibly can. Into the Breach The simplicity and tightness of the game loop for Into the Breach is absolutely stunning. I think the only game that I have come across that is equal to it is Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, but that was too old to make the list. Titanfall 2 The first person shooter is such well worn territory at this point that there aren’t many that can surprise me. Titanfall 2 is endlessly inventive and no mechanic ever overstays its welcome. It’s the sort of game that I can see myself replaying every now and then and wondering why no one makes ‘em like that anymore. Dark Souls I started Dark Souls a few times before I figured out what it was. I had to go back and play Demon’s Souls first before I got it. Dark Souls is a video game ass video game. It is what the makers of old NES side scrolling platformers would have made if they were suddenly gifted modern computer hardware and software tools. It is a modern game with a very old design attitude. I should probably go finish Dark Souls 3. I have a character stuck somewhere in the first third of that game. Super Mario Odyssey Most games frontload all of the good stuff. In the first few hours you will have seen everything the developers had in them. You will then spend the remaining hours of the game doing those same tasks over and over. For some games that’s enough. Others will start to drag. Super Mario Odyssey just keeps getting better and more fun the deeper you go. Every level is new and different. Very few games are so full of joy. Super Mario 3D World I came to this game late. It had been out for a few years before we got it, and I didn’t play it for probably another year more. When I did play it I didn’t want to put it down. Mario games have never been the sort that gives you that “one more level” feeling, but this one absolutely does. I really hope they make another. Beat Saber Any time we show someone VR, Beat Saber is one of the first games that we load up. It is a game that could not exist without VR. It just wouldn’t work. It’s more fun than pretty much any other rhythm game I have played and it’s simple enough that everyone gets what to do by their second or third attempt. It’s one of the only ‘must play’ VR experiences. Dishonored and Dishonored 2 They went and made a world so beautifully ugly that I want to walk around in it. I want to be there, in that space. I want to be in Dunwall smelling the rot and feeling the roof shingles. The magical ninja power fantasy is one of the best in any game, but I think it is the setting that really makes me love the Dishonored series. The Outer Wilds The Outer Wilds is like a magic trick. It gets you looking in one direction while it is gradually unravelling a beautiful, tragic, exultant tale right under your nose. When you suddenly see the clockwork perfection of it, it’s staggering. The fate of an entire universe all woven together through little snippets of investigation and evidence gathering. I don’t know that I have ever played a game so filled with pleasant melancholy. The Outer Wilds is one of the best games I have ever played. Ever. I’ll end it there. I could go on, and there are a few games that I cut from the list. None of them were bad, and at least a few would be someone else's favorite of the decade. Like I said, this isn’t a ranked list, just some Best Games I look forward to writing about in the future. Here are a couple of new concept paintings with their progress videos. Enjoy   There is a lot of amazing music in games. From the early 8bit days until now some of the best music written on this planet has been written in the service of games. The particular repetitive nature of game music has made it memorable both by circumstance and design. We have roughly 50 years worth of game music available to us. It would be pretty easy to argue that only since the 8bit era has game music been really great. Let's call it 35 years. Since the NES and the 8bit computers, music for games has been increasingly spectacular. From the bouncy notes of Super Mario Bros. to the choral soundscapes of Halo to the surging metal power of Doom Eternal, music is an integral part of the video game experience. So why then do almost no game soundtracks have lyrics?
I was thinking about this recently. There are only a few successful examples of game music that include singing. There are lots with choral vocalizations, but only a handful of game soundtracks actually use music with lyrics. I think I might know why, but here is a bit of rambling exploration of that thought. For quite a long time, the only way to get music out of a video game was to synthesize it. Computer memory limits meant that storing or playing back digitally recorded music was simply impossible. When it was no longer impossible, it was outlandishly expensive. When it was finally cheap enough, the technology wasn’t really in place to make it work. Eventually, the CDROM disc emerged as the standard for storing and distributing video games. Before that, the only reasonable way to store music was to encode it as a sequence that could be played back in realtime by a synthesizer chip. This led to a lot of game soundtracks having very distinct sound signatures depending on the particular synth chip being used. NES music sounds different from C64 music which sounds different from Sega Genesis music. In concept these synth soundtracks are more like reading sheet music and playing it through a particular instrument than like playing back a recording of a performance. The distinctiveness of each tune helped to make older game music memorable. The music to Super Mario Bros. only sounds like that when it comes out of a real NES. Or at least it did until fairly recently. Old video game cartridges and diskettes are very cramped spaces. Music had to fight for room alongside graphics and code so storing hours of a full orchestral arrangement was absolutely out of the realm of possibility. This meant that a lot of older game soundtracks had to be very tightly looped. Short segments of music playing again and again and again while the player attempts to defeat a given stage. Bad music became grating very quickly. Good music burrowed itself inside your head and wrapped around your nostalgia centers waiting to be reactivated with the remembrance of a few notes. There is some wonderful music scattered throughout the 8 and 16 bit eras, but none of it has lyrics. By the time it was possible to weave a soundtrack containing recorded vocal performances into a video game, the pattern of short catchy loops with occasional changups and stings had become the established style. This sort of music worked for games and the gameplay fed into the music. Habits and expectations are tough to break. Of course there is also the timing problem. While a music loop can be played over and over indefinitely, a song with verse and chorus sort of has a built in running length. Hearing someone sing the same thing many times in a row can get monotonous quickly. Making sure that a particular section of your game can be played through by a majority of the players in a certain span of time without putting the experience on rails sounds incredibly difficult. If you want the music to rise just as a player is doing something very cool, using a pre-recorded song might not cut it. Since the advent of the CDROM there have been a lot of examples of games trying to incorporate music with lyrics with varying degrees of success. Here are a few of the better examples and why I think they worked. The Metal Gear solid franchise has had some incredible music. Some of that music features great vocal performances. They hit at just the right times for maximum impact, but they almost always do it at the expense of game control. The sequence containing the track will be on rails or pre timed to match with the music. The Microwave hall in Metal Gear 4:Guns of the Patriots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdjLBYxAcUI&ab_channel=hexen2k7 Matches an operatic piece with a gut wrenching gameplay sequence, but it is entirely scripted and timed out. There isn’t much that the player can do to change the pace of this segment. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain includes the song Sins of the Father https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-8syq9F74&ab_channel=KefkaProduction Where the scene is again, preplanned and largely out of the players control. Sonic Adventure 2 Sort of kicks off with a banger Escape From the City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WcyVvWZJU4&ab_channel=DeoxysPrime The song is on loop but there is enough here for most players to only hear it a couple of times during the level. The song isn’t around long enough to overstay its welcome, but it adds some punch to an already fast and fun area of the game. Super Mario Odyssey’s jazzy Jump Up, Super Star! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjVFfjg8dds&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1IHvzwUd6w&ab_channel=AFGuidesHD Likewise plays on loop, but the area has been timed out pretty tightly so you are unlikely to hear the 4 or so minute song more than once. When you do reach the end, you can listen to it again for as long as you want. Also in Super Mario Odyssey, sounding like a lost The Bangles song Honeylune Ridge:Escape https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjVFfjg8dds&t=7427s Loops but doesn’t wear on the player due to how tightly timed the underlying level is. Then you have Supergiant Games. Every one of their games include songs with lyrics that kick off and accentuate gameplay, but the reason these work is a little different. From Supergiants first game, Bastion, a folk song that is heard as two solos during the game comes together as a duet in the finale. https://youtu.be/9JvNhc13oKI?t=39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g60bPpXEq9Q&ab_channel=SupergiantGames This song isn’t a soundtrack to the game, it exists in world and characters can be found singing it. When you come across them it is extremely moving as the words have meaning in the world of the game, and it makes sense for the characters to be singing them. The songs not only feed into the story, but having them repeat makes perfect sense in a folk song tradition. These are characters Idly singing the songs of their respective cultures, that happen to be part of a fractured whole. In one sequence the player is under no threat, and in the other you can do nothing but walk forward. Good Riddance from Hades is great for setting mood and is primarily sung by two characters, also in world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yco-B4BSaj4&ab_channel=SupergiantGames Again when the song plays, there will be no pressure on the player so focussing on the lyrics and the meaning behind them is possible. We All Become from Transistor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9O2Rjn1azc&ab_channel=SupergiantGames There are a couple of great songs with lyrics in this game about a singer. In the world of the game these are her songs. They feel connected and natural. They are also largely played during sequences when you have limited or no control over the character so timing isn’t much of an issue. Control https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ods12uljo6w&ab_channel=CerebralTiger This sequence has it all. A long but looping song, segments of action gameplay, segments of very linear movement, and timed progression. They also adjust the playback of the song on the fly so that the parts that need to rise and fall during the sequence can do so dynamically. When they want you to feel like an awesome, powerful superhero, metal music and growly vocals kick in at just the right moments. This might honestly be the current high water mark for using music with lyrics in a game, during gameplay, to reinforce gameplay. Here is the Director of Control talking about how the sequence was accomplished. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJsXZhSsaUk&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=Noclip So it seems like if you want to have lyrics in your game music, and you don’t want it to be jarring, you have to either have to run it over a cut scene or a limited interaction sequence, time it out impeccably and don’t be concerned with possible looping, or do what Remedy did with Control and layer every part of that sequence in a way that you can dial it up and down dynamically. Music playback technology has come far enough that it is possible to sequence pre-recorded vocals and music just like they did on the synth chips of the 8 bit era. That last option seems the most difficult to pull off, but now that a few game creators have proved that it is possible maybe we will hear a lot more music with lyrics in future games. Best Games - Batman: The Video Game Look at this. Just look at it.  Okay. You seen that. Now look at this.  Did you take that in. Did you count how many colors are on screen. I did. The first screenshot has 8. There are 8 colors on the screen there. The second jumps it up all the way to 12. 12 colors. I suppose it’s technically 13 since one of the values in the foreground elements is transparent. The rest of the game proceeds the same way.
I’m no expert on the capabilities of the Nintendo Entertainment System, but from what I can gather it would have been possible to have around 24 colors on screen at any one time. 25 if you're feeling squirrely. It might have even been possible to display more colors with some trickery, anywhere from the low 50’s all the way up to 256. Most devs at the time could assemble a solid palette of 24 colors from a preselected range of 64. Not great, but not too shabby. When Sunsoft created Batman: The Video Game they looked at all of those available colors and just said ‘Nah, 12 and one transparent value is fine”. They were right. More striking than the extremely limited palette is the use of black. The overwhelming majority of every frame this game draws to the screen is black. Background tiles blend away naturally. Shadows are so deep they swallow up everything leaving only the faintest hints of distant Gotham lights. It’s a bold choice. It feels very Batman. There were a lot of games around the time that Batman came out that used very limited color palettes and spare background graphics. The NES, after all, was not a powerful machine even by the standards of the day. Most graphically constrained games on the hardware seem like compromises. For Batman, it seems like a choice. I realize that I haven’t really talked about the gameplay. The game plays great. Extremely precise, extremely difficult. It’s not a hectic game. Every movement, every jump, every batarang toss, is demanding and calculated. In that way the game also plays like Batman. Every button press has to be considered, accurate, and timed perfectly. I know that I finished the game at one point, but I don’t think I ever made it past the 4th level without cheats. Games used to be really really hard. I think that Batman: The Video Game is one of the best examples of a limitation being turned into an asset. The game remains as beautiful today as when it came out, and I doubt anyone would ever notice that the color palette is so limited. It’s a great game, but even based on looks alone, Batman: The Video Game is one of the best games. When you are expecting a new baby everyone is keen to tell you about all of the firsts. There will be a first poop. A first step. A first fall. A first full night sleep. A first real laugh. A first word. A first illness. A first solid meal. A first sentence. A first day of school.
There are so many firsts to anticipate. So many firsts that seem so important. So many that you try to record or inscribe to memory. Most of them will be quickly lost amidst a flood of seconds and thirds and so on. Some you will regret losing to time, some will be better lost. Some will burn so deep in you that you will recall them perfectly and often for years after. What people never tell you is all the lasts. There will be a last diaper. A last toddlers tantrum. There will be a last breastfeed. A last daytime nap. Lasts are usually things you are glad are over. I think this is why people don’t mention them. That last diaper is a real relief and something to look forward to, but you won’t remember it. Every night before bed I would read to my kids. There was probably a first bedtime story for us, but I don’t remember what it was. The last was only a few months ago. That was a last that will stick with me. They like to read on their own now. At night or whenever. I understand it and appreciate it, but I don’t have to like it. Over the years we went from reading picture books and small short stories to entire series of novels. I didn’t keep count but I know that I have read, out loud, at least 50 novels to my kids. Some of them I did voices for the different characters. Some I didn’t. Some were so dull I would tune out and think about something else while I said the words on the page. Some I had to fight back tears to read certain scenes. During some of them, everyone was fighting back tears. Doing that every night. Reading stories out loud. That’s the sort of thing that wears a groove into your heart. Giving that up, giving up reading to them wasn’t something I wanted to do. Of course there are lasts. I knew that this would be one of them. I knew it, but I don’t have to like it. I know that when the next book in the Kingkiller Chronicle series comes out, I will likely read it on my own, as will they. We will be able to talk about it and discuss it and share it in the way that adults and young adults typically share stories, but I probably won’t read it out loud to them. That stings a little. But for them and for me I know it’s okay. Things change and just as there are firsts, there are lasts. As long as everyone is safe and healthy, lasts are something we all just need to accept. I know it’s more difficult for me than it is for them. Don’t be too surprised if I start reading some of these posts and recording them. I’ll just call it therapy. I started this one by quickly smashing some color down and starting the characters form and pose. After two false starts I finally got an angle that I thought I could work with and build on. I'm not someone who sees an image fully formed in their head and then tries to recreate it. I start with some sketches in pencil or paint approximating roughly what I want and then go in search of some pose reference to solidify it. Google image search is absolutely vital, but more often then not I watch videos. Even when I try to capture a single moment, I still think in motion. When I look at this picture I see the frames before and after it. I could probably come up with more dynamic looks if I could focus on getting one single perfect frame out of the end of the stylus and, in this case, onto the iPad screen. Anyway, here is another picture and some progression pics I snapped on the way there.  Best Games - Karateka
Fighting games are all about range and timing. You press the kick button of this side of the screen and a few milliseconds later your character has their leg extended reaching for the unguarded midsection of your opponent. Let that kick fly from too far a distance and the game's hidden collision boxes strike nothing. Too close and your opponent can intercept with a shorter range, but slightly quicker attack of their own. Range and timing. Karateka is probably best known as one of the first, if not the first, cinematic games. Jordan Mechner was a college student studying film when he developed Karateka. The game wears those film school influences proudly. Musical stings. Cuts to establishing and framing shots. Presenting your progress through the stages with wordless camera movements rather than scripted story dumps. Fluid rotoscope style character animation. It all works to propel you through the game, but I don’t want to talk about any of that. It is amazing to me how successful Karateka is as a fighting game. Karate Champ is typically thought of as the first arcade fighting game. It is a twin stick game where you can use fairly complex inputs to manipulate the would-be Karate Champ. You can engage in martial combat against a computer opponent or against another person. While firing off attacks in Karate Champ isn’t too terribly difficult, actually landing them is. Still, as a first shot in a genre Karate Champ is a decent game. A flawed early step into what would eventually be the last great arcade genre before home consoles overtook location based games. In contrast, Karateka nearly knocks it out of the park. Karateka, Karate Champ, and side scroller beat’em up Kung Fu Master, were released the same year so it is pretty much impossible that Jordan Mechner took any inspiration from them, or any other fighting game for that matter. Karateka is a fully formed singular creation. Punch and kick fighting was just in the early 80’s air. Even with that ‘first game in a genre’ deficit Karateka manages to nail the fighting game formula. It’s all about range and timing. It’s true that Karateka offers no player vs. player mode, but in the game’s defence, it was programmed on an Apple II. Not a real powerhouse of computer hardware, even at the time. The best that could be accomplished was pitting the player against one solitary computer enemy at a time. It does help that this limitation plays into all the Kung Fu and Karate movie tropes of a lone warrior defeating a cadre of villains singlehanded. Only Karateka seems to be set in a world where no one ever learned to turn around. The fighting system itself does seem like it would probably work in a player vs player mode, as evidenced by this patch to the game that lets a second person play as the enemies ( https://archive.org/details/karateka-two-player ). Karateka is a smooth and deliberate game. You will quickly learn over the first handful of enemies that you can’t mash on the attack button and hope to win. You need to wait for your enemy to overextend themselves before you dive in to deliver a kick or series of quick punches. The whole game is range and timing. You can keep yourself a hair out of their range, rocking back and forth in a crossover step just waiting for enemy goons to slip up and launch a kick at the air where your head used to be. And if things are getting too hot and your health is dwindling you can retreat a few steps. Jordan Mechner recounts in the journals he kept while making Karateka how he thought games needed to have two different but overlapping goals. In Karateka you need to balance the fights against individual enemies with the total ground you have to cover. You will need to start at the edge of a cliff and fight all the way through a fortress in order to battle the final enemy, Akuma. If you retreat more than you advance during a fight you won’t reach the next checkpoint before a fresh guard appears. Retreat too far, and you fall off the cliff. The faster you close the distance between you and Akuma, the fewer guards you will have to deal with. Some of the later fights can be very tough so you won’t want to retreat much if you can help it. Even the meta game of Karateka hinges on range and timing. It is a fighting game to its core. Karateka might be one of the earliest fighting games, but it’s also one of the best games. |
Owen McManus