In Part 4 of the Awards/Shopping Guide, Leveling Down will be tackling some of the more controversial categories: Best Story, Best Value, and Most Overrated. Admittedly, these categories are VERY subjective and are only our opinions, and on some counts even espion4ge and I don’t see *exactly* eye to eye. Nonetheless, controversy is a lot of fun, so might as well give it a shot!
One of the Xbox 360′s strongest features compared to other consoles is its multiplayer gameplay, which can probably be attributed to the Live infrastructure. It is thus not surprisingly to see strong multiplayer games on this system. For today’s awards, I will be discussing the best multiplayer games released this year, and the one better than the rest.
I will also be discussing the best new IP and best sequel of the year. It’s good to see that in 2009, there were nearly an equal number of good new IPs and sequels. The moment we begin seeing only sequels releasing and new IPs no longer developed is the moment the game industry stops advancing. It’s easy to support sequels since you know what you’re getting yourself into, but this year was perhaps the year with the largest number of development studios shutting down. Continue to take a chance by supporting new IPs – the developers need this type of support to stay in business and come up with new and exciting games to push our industry forward!
Rounding out our main categories, today we will be looking at Best Action/Adventure, Music, Real-Time Strategy and XBLA games. Looking at the list of titles from this year, there were a surprising number of good action/adventure games out this year, and even though neither of us owns a PS3, you can’t talk about action/adventure in 2009 without mentioning Uncharted 2. I’m glad I didn’t have to nominate that game though, since that would probably have made for some tough decisions. Music games, on the other hand, seemed to take a step backwards, or maybe we are just getting sick of them. Meanwhile, Live Arcade continues to put out good titles worth taking a look at.
It’s that time of the year again…as 2009 draws to a close and the holiday season is upon us, cmfl3x and I decided that we wanted to do our own “Leveling Down” gaming awards for 2009 where we choose winners in several categories for Xbox 360 games that have been released in 2009. At the same time, we also wanted to preserve the holiday shopping guide that Leveling Down produced last year but felt that the awards and the shopping guide were too similar.
Instead of separate 2009 awards and holiday shopping guide posts, we’ve decided to combine them this year into one. Every game we’ve nominated within our awards are games worth considering for the holidays, but at the same time, we’re also declaring the winner. Consider the awards as, if you can only buy one game from the nominees of the category, buy the winner. But if you are further interested in other games from the category, you should definitely pick them up as well as they have aspects that all make them worth considering. Game boxes have been provided for all nominees, and all of them link to Amazon, our gaming retailer of the year due to not only their ridiculous gaming deals, but their constant vigilance in price matching practically all competitors.
Our 2009 awards/shopping guide will span all week, with cmfl3x and me alternating posts and writing about a few categories each day. This will culminate on Friday when we both share our own nominations for Game of the Year, and our picks for Game of the Year. I will kick things off today with three categories: 2009′s Best Fighting Game, Best Role Playing Game, and Best First Person Shooter for the Xbox 360.
The USS Arizona Memorial – a reminder of a world at war
When Call of Duty: World at War was released, I remember reading a bit of hubbub about how the developer Treyarch wasn’t treating the source material with enough respect. Some people had a problem with the Pacific theater, where fighting was much more brutal. I didn’t think much of it at the time, though I did think a little bit about how video games treat historical wars properly.
Last week I visited the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, the one ship they never raised out of the water, and I began thinking about video games’ treatment of war again. It is a very solemn place - 1,277 American soldiers lost their lives there in an instant, and it is a memorial in their honor. The two hour experience is spent mostly in quiet contemplation (by design), and it’s one of the few places you’ll ever see where there are hundreds of people but barely any talking. At a few times during my trip around the memorial, I was reminded of Coral Sea, the air-only map in Battlefield 1943. As I imagined Japanese Zeroes coming over the mountaintops towards Pearl Harbor, the images in my mind were formed using what I’ve “experienced” on Coral Sea.
I wonder whether it’s okay to have so much fun recreating events that caused such pain and loss. I can see how war veterans might be offended that legions of kids are “killing Japs” and getting a rush out of it without necessarily understanding the significance or cost of such wars. I’ve never bought into the argument that playing violent video games makes people more prone to violence, but I do think it can desensitize us a little.
Anyway, I still have Modern Warfare 2 on preorder and I’m not canceling it, although I did consider it briefly. What is important to me, I think, is that video games do their best to honor the source material just as some war movies do the same. In that sense I think World at War did a decent job highlighting the large costs and losses that were experienced in the Pacific theater. Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway also tried to highlight the psychological damage that soldiers experienced.
In the end, video games are just games, and I’ll continue to enjoy them as just that, but like any form of media, I think it’s a good idea for the industry to consider some of the “deeper” things every once in awhile.
