Turbo Boss Battle! Daily Gaming. Daily Exploding Shotgun Shells.

The Best that 2009 Had to Offer!

crafted by: Paul

While in Boston at PAX I borrowed a stack of "Must Play 2009" games from Alex, and have been slowly working my way through them in the past few weeks. I was fortunate to finally purchase a PS3 last summer (pre-Slim, thank you very much *hardcore*), and spent all the coins I could scrounge from the sewer collecting the backlog of excellent titles available for Sony's excellent system. As such, I could only go for those games I REALLY, 100%-knew-I'd-love wanted. So that left a lot of titles that I sorta really wanted to play out in the cold. But as I said, I've been playing some of these big hitters from 2009 and I thought I'd talk about them!

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Earlier this week I beat Batman: Arkham Asylum, a truly solid game and excellent Batman sim. I was extremely impressed with the first half of the game, impressed by the fluid gameplay mechanics and the great level design. Don't get me started on how great the cape looked. I loved it until about halfway when they stopped presenting new ideas, and just repeated variations of the same thing. Another boss fight where you have to dodge ramming brutes, another encounter with Scarecrow where you have to avoid his stare-beams, another gargoyle room where you have to stun every enemy. Even the upgrades got to be repetitive (more batarangs, more grappling hooks). I think a sequel would really take everything good about this and make it great.

Also, a side note, that I'm tired of the Unreal Engine and it's super shiny textures. Sure, it's an easy way to look good, but it in Batman I found it sometimes distracting. Batman's mouth, for instance, could barely move when he was talking. And, it's just so... Unreal looking.

Red Faction: Guerilla

I played the demo for this game on Xbox Live and wasn't blown away. But it seemed like in every Year's Best of 2009, Red Faction was the game that wasn't in the top 10, but was always the "Secret Best". Playing the full version of the game, there's still some lame stuff that turns me of: combat is pretty janky, and some of the controls and open world mission structure things are illogical. But blowing things up with this games masterful engine is SO much fun and SO addicting, that you could say the crappy stuff is DEMOLISHED.

This is the most fun I've had in a sandbox game since Mercs 1, and in many ways it feels even more like a real SANDBOX than any other game of its type. The developers give you tools and toys, and you're just out they're fuckin' around with them. From what I've played of Just Cry 2, the world is interesting and you can traverse it interestingly, but you don't feel in control of the world. In Red Faction, you feel in control of the world, like that kid in his sandbox with his action figures and exploding sandcastles.

If anything bad can be said it's that the candy of destruction in this game is too sweet, too addicting. I'm sort of burnt out on it already, and I hate doing anything that doesn't involve hammering or bombing away at walls.