Splash Damage Blog
What We Played: Splash Damage's Games of the Year
What better way to ring in a whole new year than by picking out our favorite games of 2009? Last year brought us some fantastic gaming experiences, with both sequels and original titles delivering The Fun in serious quantities. With so many games, we put it to our team to select up to three of their favorite games of 2009 and share them with all of you.
We also have two new faces joining our gamer line-up this week, with effects guru Farhan 'middlecat' Qureshi and Production Tester Chris 'captainjonesy' Jones proving that they have keyboards and are not afraid to use them.
And the winner(s) is/are...
Chris 'captainjonesy' Jones (Production Tester):
There were too many awesome games released in 2009 and I personally can’t decide on a single GOTY, so here is my list of faves:
Plants vs Zombies: This is such a tightly designed tower defence game with broad and varied enemy types and turrets making each level have unique sense of challenge and flow, getting me hooked me to the very end - I couldn't stop playing it. PopCap have done it again, another form of addiction.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: Need I say more? Amazing single player with compelling characters and story which I really ended up caring for and scripting and set piecing taken to the next level for technical wow along with gameplay. Of course, the MP is so much fun, just grabbing someone whilst hanging off a ledge is just golden.
Demon's Souls: This game is one of the most hardcore, devoid, difficult and horrifying games I've played in a long time, making you feel constantly on edge, but it has a great sense of achievement and reward overcoming such extreme odds surviving battles with such evil demonic monsters. It's hard work to get into but certainly worth the effect for the experience.
One of PlayStation's stand-out titles this year: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
Farhan 'middlecat' Qureshi (FX Artist):
I didn’t play as many games last year as I should have, but my favourite I would say would be the PS3 title Infamous. As well being a bit more original than a lot of games, it actually had a story and characters that were very engaging and did surprise me with some of the twists.
Steve 'badman' Hessel (Community Relations Manager):
My game of the year is Assassin's Creed II. I really enjoyed the first one, so I didn't need any convincing to try out the sequel. When I did, though, I was blown away by the sheer amount of game there is in the thing. Seemingly endless environments filled with so many different things to do, tied together by great characters, a captivating story, and an inspired setting.
A very close second for me is Batman: Arkham Asylum, which was my other favourite gaming experience of the year. AA succeeds in making you feel like you are Batman in a game world that seems like it could actually exist. It's also one of the least frustrating action games I've ever played, and the Joker's always-hilarious running commentary is the delicious icing on the Batcake. Well done, Rocksteady!
Arne Olav 'ao' Hallingstad (Programmer):
I’d choose Dragon Age: Origins. I’ve been waiting for a deep gaming experience for years and the amount of story in this game is like no other game. I spent about 85 hours completing it and there’s so much I missed the first time. All six starting locations have a different story, multiple classes to choose from and decisions about what skills and attributes to improve. With the huge amount of dialog choices that are mutually exclusive the second play through will be as enjoyable I bet. This time I’m ditching Wynne (ok she’s ditching me) and going with the reaver specialization!
One of the last major releases of the year, but also one of the best: Assassin's Creed II.
Paul 'MoP' Greveson (Senior Technical Artist):
Left 4 Dead (and the sequel) definitely have to be my favourite games of 2009. I’ve played so much L4D at home and during lunchtime at work, it’s not even funny. While the basics of the game are pretty easy to grasp, it’s just the scope of the co-operative play that makes it such a huge attraction to me. Every game you play online is different, it’s all down to how the teams are formed, and while it can sometimes be frustrating to lose against an unbalanced team, it still remains fun throughout. I have a feeling I will remain addicted to L4D2 through the majority of 2010...
Matt 'Anti' Lowe (Production Coordinator):
My game of the year nominations are two games that haven’t actually been released this year but frankly, I don’t care! :P
Heroes of Newerth (Beta) – I’ve always hated the idea of commercial developers cashing in on the magnificent game that the modders behind Warcraft 3’s Defence of the Ancients have made, but S2 Games have done a great job with HoN! Beautiful graphics, fantastic new supporting features and some great new hero characters. It also retains a refreshing level of complexity that all ground-breaking PC based games should have. It could have been released months ago but it’s still being polished in beta, definitely worth a purchase (or better yet, hunt down a beta key)!
Mass Effect – Ok, so I’m late to the party. I was so hyped about this game before it came out but when I first played it I quit just a few hours in, I hated it! However, with hype growing around the awesome looking sequel I decided to go back and give the original a second try just before Christmas, it’s brilliant! The dialogue system is great, like watching a proper movie, the characters are very likeable and the combat is fun. My expectations for the sequel are now going through the roof.
Chris 'Hauser' Bull (Animator):
I only properly played a few games last year but I doubt anything could have surpassed the fun I had playing through Modern Warfare 2. True edge-of-your-seat excitement pretty much start to finish and think it really raised the bar for clever use of playable first person cinematic moments that completely draw you into the moment.
One of our favourite multiplayer titles of the year: Borderlands.
Ed 'MrEd' Reid (Online Services Programmer):
3rd Place - The Beatles: Rock Band
The last barrier for gaming was broken when the launch of the Wii managed to enliven the traditional family get-togethers at Christmas. That has been truly outdone by the fabulous The Beatles: Rock Band. Never would my Mum and Dad decide that what would really make things swing along would be a good old fashioned Metallica sing-a-long but The Beatles? Well that’s another matter.
2nd Place - The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
So there wasn’t anything in the rules saying it had to be released this year! After all other games this year had been exhausted, the quiet of the Christmas holidays still found me trotting back to Cyrodil and unleashing mighty fury on all and sundry. Oblivion is surely a true masterpiece of a game.
1st Place - Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II
Released way back in February 2009 no other game chewed up as many hours of play or conversation in the pub as Dawn of War II, not just for me but for many tapirs here at SD with pitched battles fought over many lunchtimes. The obsession with strategies, counters and dps got to an extent where the only logical option was to start an in-house league to settle once and for all who was the greatest commander. The intensity of combat reached such a fever pitch that opponents would stalk around the outside of the competition, only taking each other on once all possible replays were reviewed in minute detail, build orders calculated for maximum efficiency and dps combos worked out for every eventuality. 2010 brings Chaos Rising and I can’t wait!
One of this year's best original titles: Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Aubrey 'Bezzy' Hesselgren (Technical Game Designer):
No prizes for guessing my selection: Street Fighter IV. It’s not just because this game has taken up most of my gaming time (in bite-sized 90 second chunks) that this is my game of the year. It’s also getting my nod because of how much I’ve learned about player psychology in competitive games. At the high level there’s “yomi layers”, guessing games, spooking, sharking, baiting and behavioural conditioning, set upon a foundation of finely tuned kinaesthetics which make pulling off a full connect f.SRK xx FADC xx Ultra feel equivalent in skill to a flaring up a Hendrix solo.
It’s simpler than its more recent predecessors, but still as faceted as a snowflake. It’s made me re-discover the writings of David Sirlin whose convictions on all forms of competitive gaming were so hardcore that they used to scare me. After studying this game, all his advice makes total sense and feels applicable to what we do at Splash Damage. On top of all that, it has an art style which looks set to stand the test of time. Street Fighter IV has crystallized why I love games, and made me want to be a better developer.
Neil 'Exedore' Alphonso (Lead Level Designer):
Borderlands: An almost perfect mix of loot-whoring MMO addictiveness and FPS fun. I expect the sequel to be great.
Batman: Arkham Asylum: Near flawless execution, from another small independent London studio... who are closer to Arsenal, though!
Guitar Hero Metallica: I’ve been a fan for over two decades now, so it’s really more than an Of the Year event for me. That and it’s the first game to have a proper double-bass pedal mode, a true benchmark in music games.
Olivier 'Nosebone' Leonardi (Art Director):
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves really blew me away. Discovering a new environment was most of the time an OMG moment. Add to that the action packed sequences, the tongue in cheek humour... such a fantastic game…
Also, GTA4: The Ballad of Gay Tony: fresh missions, great characters, and a funny new story - an amazing amount of content for a DLC pack.
So there you have it, Splash Damage's Games of the Year 2009. What were yours? Let us know in the comments!
Comments
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Exactly that is the reason why I'm not as excited about Brink as I should or could be. The whole favourite list is filled with RPG's and console games. Sure, there are a lot more people working at Splash Damage, but if this is the trend I doubt Brink will be as legendary as W:ET or even as good as ET:QW. The only excuse you can have is that 2009 didn't have any really good FPS titles.
Game of the year for me is split between Arkham Asylum, Borderlands and AC2. MW2 is close to the top, but the number of issues that have cropped up (either glitches or imbalances) in MP has sullied it somewhat, especially when a lot of those could've been picked up before release.
sweetest: Flaboo!
most "important": tie between Mafia Wars and 1v100
most impressive single moment: MW2
best co-op with the wife: PixelJunk Shooter
best overall package: yeah, Uncharted 2
p.s. I haven't played Batman Arkham yet... Locki and Davros have been hogging the company copies for months now!!!
My game of the year would have to be the new Batman game. Whilst it didn't really push any boundaries, it was just a very solid and polished game. The combat was fun, the voice acting and script was great, the puzzles were interesting, the graphics looked awesome (when you didn't have detective mode on anyway, ooops).
Second to that would be Assassin's Creed II. Again, nothing really ground-breaking here, just a refinement of almost everything from the first game. I loved the original, but it got rather repetitive, something I never felt about the new game. The combat was better, and no longer involved waiting for a counter in every single fight, and climbing around in the city was as fun as ever.
Other notable mentions: 1v100 Season 2, Machinarium, Dragon Age:Origins, Shadow Complex.
I also found it interesting that I'm a technical designer and I also picked Street Fighter IV as my game of the year. I feel like Uncharted 2 is the game of the year, but my game of the year has to go to the game I played the most.
So anyway, to explain in detail what I mean:
There is no definition on what a good game is. Some will say that a good game is a game that sold well. Others will say that the number of active players shows the quality of a game. Some might say it's both those things combined. Opinions are opinions.
From my point of view, as a gamer, I care mainly about the game itself only then about the sales (if a game has a low number of players I won't have enough options to play it with others). Does a developer studio see it the same way? I seriously doubt that. A game developer studio wants to build a franchise that is popular and sells well, so when the next entry in the franchise gets released people will buy it. I am not saying that is a bad thing. This is how it works and it is how it should be.
I have never owned a developer studio so I can't base this on experience, I can just assume. My assumption is that when a new franchise is about to be build the decision making people in a company have to discuss what will sell. If it's a completely new market you guess, you speculate what will sell. If it's an existing market you obviously look at the competition. You look what makes a certain product or service sell and you try to incorporate this into your own product or service. You can call it copying, you can call it inspiration or influence.
Let's say you want to get into the mobile phone market. There is a market in place already, there is demand, there is competition. You know that by building a basic plastic mobile phone with calling and text messaging capacity you won't flood the market and you won't build a successful franchise. So you look at the competition. But you don't look at the pictures of their phones on Google or watch the reviews on YouTube. You buy their phones, give them to your engineers and give them some time with them. They then discuss the features, what they felt was good, what was bad and you try to build a great phone based on that.
Why would that be different with games? Game developers discuss other games. The game developers are gamers themselves. They are influenced by games long before they even start working at a game developer studio. What would a racing game fanatic bring into your fantasy RPG? A different view maybe, but that's hardly the goal. If you would be making a fantasy RPG you would hire people that play those type of games. If they play them it usually means they like them. You would have RPG players as developers and RPG fans would be your target audience.
Now what does that have to do with Splash Damage (still, just in my opinion). If there would only be PC FPS players at Splash Damage that completely ignore other genres and systems they would probably be developing a pure FPS game for PC's. It probably wouldn't be innovative or ground breaking, but it would be a proper PC FPS experience with all the things a hardcore FPS no-life could ever dream of.
The people at Splash Damage aren't all hardcore PC-only FPS-only gamers. They play console games, RPG's, puzzle games, RTS and even Guitar Hero. The more they play all the other genres and systems the more they drift away from a pure PC FPS. Of course this is a good thing if you build a FPS with a very wide target audience. And, in my opinion, Brink will be exactly that. A fun teambased multiplayer FPS for the general gamer and will not be another Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. That's the plan and the favourite games list is another confirmation for me. I would have been a little bit happier if I would know for a fact that someone is still trying to put some hardcore into Brink but I don't see that on this list. Yes, as I said, there are many more people working at Splash Damage, but, it's a trend.
One more thing (which should be obvious), since it seems like a requirement these days and you can't state any opinion without it: I still think Brink looks great and will most probably be fun, I understand that people at Splash Damage will play whatever games they like, it should never be a requirement to like a certain game for you to work on something else. The decision making people at Splash Damage know what they are doing and know what they want to achieve. I'm no expert on game development, the whole post are just my opinions and speculations.
PS English is not my first nor second language, don't assume I'm uneducated or simple minded by looking at my grammar.
Trendy smilie
The most memorable games 2009 for me were:
Machinarium (beautiful art and sound)
The Book of Unwritten Tales (nice German point&click adventure with lots of humour)
Quake Live (way too many hours spend with it and still so much to learn and so many skills to acquire)
i think quite the opposite of what you think. i think it's important to have a deep look at other games. take eg new super mario bros for wii. the game is very simple. but it got style. it got stuff in it that makes it distinct from other games of the genre and there's a hell lot of that kind of games. it was the first mario game i played and i didn't know why i liked it. until i looked deeper. eg here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VPAO71XpOU
of course you need to be in the game to get the feeling. but do you see how the gameflow and the music work together. the little turtle swinging to the sound put a kid's smile on my face. this love to detail is what makes nintendo games stick out from other games of the genre. and that's only one of many things of which other devs should take an example.
i think it's important to broaden the horizon by taking a look into other directions. because if you don't, you end up with just another fps, where hardcore would mean just another wolf:et with beyond recognition dumbed down gfx. they could as well cancel brink and we could all keep on playing wolf:et. the often mentioned drop-in/out of the game isn't exactly something that makes me want to buy brink. neither is the "smart button". seriously, i can't hear that anymore. it's like "omg awesome, the game is playing itself for me". what i like is the mirror's edge jumping, sliding, etc. that's what makes brink interesting for me. from reviews i've read that this looks like coming from "mirror's edge" and "prince of persia". those aren't fps games either, so i rather value the look into other genres.
eg i've seen a gameplay vid of bad company 2 recently. some quad bike driving, jumping down, shooting and such. all i thought of was: why should i want to play that? i've already had that with quake wars and it looked like more fun there.
also: the sd doodes are playing an fps day in day out. don't you think they'd want to do sth different when they aren't at work?
@Rahdo
Yeah, MW1 single player was really fantastic, great story!
I met a guy a couple of years ago who still relentlessly plays a 1990 flight-sim called Red Baron (you can find it on Abandonia), it's basically his go-to game. He didn't really play any other multiplayer games because this was as good as it got for him. He was happy playing in his same tightly-knit community of pilots and going on the same runs against the same opponants in the same locales, to the point where I wonder if it was more the comfort of the community and safety of the predictable nature of the players' actions in the game that he craved or the game experience itself. Is he hardcore?
'Hardcore' (and I use it myself for lack of precision) is a bit of a muddy word really. It's the type of word that post-modernists drool over because everyone has a slightly different view of what it means when they use it. We could say Red Baron fan is hardcore for sticking with a game for almost two decades, or we could say that someone who buys the latest games in the genre -no matter how ropey-is hardcore, or maybe it's the player that spends every minute of their free time playing games. Maybe a better word is 'obsessive'; I know I've been obsessed with one or more games over the years. I do think it's important to get inside the head of the people you're making the game for. A lot of VIPs in games either admit to or advise that designers make the games they want to play. But I don't think you need to play a game obsessively for an extended period of time, to the point where you ignore everything else happening around you, to get a good feel for what makes it tick. On the other hand if people are still religiously playing these games it could be because nothing since has surpassed it, and it's worth taking note of why that might be.
Back to the Red Baron pilot. If he were a designer, would you honestly be more or less confident in his abilities to design an up-to-date flight-sim? It's one thing to have not played the classics of the genre of the game you're working on if the design or mechanics fall under your remit, but to base all your decisions on the conventions of one genre? Why would you restrict yourself to one genre when playing other genres grants a greater understanding and perspective of your own work? As a matter of opinion, cross-pollination of ideas fuels creativity.
Personally I think the best FPS game out this year was Left4Dead 2. It may just be the sheer number of quality single-player games on offer in 2009, or just that there weren't really that many FPS PC games released this past year. If there is an absence of PC FPS games on the list there is probably a good reason for it. I did also play Borderlands and really enjoyed the gunplay, style and brief moments of humour. It's just a pity my initial understanding of it on release wasn't in tune with the experience I got when I played it, so I think I ended up buying/playing something else.
Also don't forget that we're working on an FPS all hours of the day, and a lot of people in the team are taking their work home with them and playing more FPSes for research in their spare time. Sometimes you might just want a break from an FPS and sit down to something slower-paced, especially if your goal is to relax.
P.S. I realise now that Joe touched on a number of these points already.
P.P.S. Poons was recommending the new SMBros only the other day.
As for Uncharted 2 I don't see what all the hype was about. It was ok, decent at best in my opinion. The thing that kept pissing me off was that I would fall from 2 feet and somehow fall to my death which made absolutely no sense. Maybe I just didn't like it because I played it for the console instead of the PC.
The one game I was most disappointed with was the Halo 3: ODST. That game was horrible, not that I particularly like any of the rest, but at least they were fairly good. ODST was just complete shit, probably one of the worst FPS games I have ever played. The thing that I hated the most about it was after the last battle it just ended and I stood there staring at my TV thinking "that was the last fight?" That had to be the most disappointing ending battle for any game I've played.
I remember playing Red Baron at my friend's house about 15 years ago (on OS/2 Warp, I think, for some reason)... if there are people still playing it now then I think that's definitely hardcore!
l thus think Crispy is correct =)
that'd be my 2009 game
note: you really need 4 friends to play with you, it's usually rubbish playing with randoms on your team.
I'm sure BRINK will be my GotY 2010!
Uncharted 2 - so very well polished and paced.
Assassin's Creed 2 - takes a little while to get into, but has really surprised me.
Street Fighter 4 - the perfect example of how to update an old game.
DJ Hero - so much fun. Could do with more of a 'party' feel though, but thoroughly enjoyed it
ODST (Firefight) - Firefight has been brilliant fun and I intend to stick with it.
I personally do not like L4D, because of exactly the point i was making. Every game doesnt feel new and interesting, its fun for a while but then its the same game, with same scenario, on same maps, i dont feel it offers the capacity for engineuity to the extent of other games (i know it does to an extent, but as i said, not as much as others). Those who do play, are often playing because they like playing with friends or they have got good and enjoy winning. This is great but i feel it misses the entertainment factor along with the infinite possibilities etqw provided.
But yea, fav game of the year is ETQW