In Third Person

With the year winding down, many gamers have been discussing the best games of 2009, mostly to debate which game should be honoured "Game of the Year". I think it's impossible for any media outlet or any individual person to make a list that will make everyone happy. However, what I can do better than anyone else is speak for myself. With that said, my choice for "Game of the Year" is not the be-all-end-all opinion you have to believe in. Feel free to give me your picks for "Game of the Year" and "Game of the Year" nominees.

So...where to start? I guess so that we're all playing on somewhat common ground, I would cover off a few games that have been consensus "Game of the Year" nominees among many video game media outlets and go from there.

Uncharted 2

I've heard all sorts of wonderful things about the game's cinematic experience and super-fun gameplay. However, I do not own a PS3 as of this time, so I've never played it or the original. In the event I ever get a chance to play it, I will definitely give it a shot.



Assassin's Creed 2

Many critics of the first game had their gripes fixed with Assassin's Creed 2. Because of the criticisms of the first game, I decided to pass on the experience completely. However, with the great word-of-mouth and the "12 Days of Gaming" sale at EB Games (I got it brand new for $30), I thought I would give it a shot. I'm just over half way through the game and it's blowing my mind. The game does a fantastic job of making you buy into the life of Ezio. In terms of plot and setting, I haven't played anything this interesting...possibly ever. It's arguably the prettiest of all the open-world games out there right now. There's also a ton of fun stuff to do outside the great main quest. My only gripe with it is that the controls sometimes leave a bit to be desired when Ezio doesn't make the precision jumps you want him to because of the game's auto-correct jumping mechanics.



Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Up until I won this at my mom's work Christmas party, I had never played a CoD game and thought I never would. Man, was I missing out. So far the game is a ton of fun to play and really feels like an evolution on the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark era of FPS games that I am fond of. The only major sticking point to me is that the game feels kind of hard on normal difficulty, but maybe that's just because I'm a newbie (and not that good). I will definitely put more time into it in the new year.



New Super Mario Bros Wii

I don't think any game this year captures pure fun like New Super Mario Bros Wii. As a single player experience, it feels a lot like Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World, arguably the best two games in the series. It's also not a piece of cake like the DS version, so it will provide a great challenge for even the most seasoned Mario veteran. What changes the whole dynamic of the game though is the co-op play for up to 4 players. With 4 people in the screen, it's absolute madness. It's a testament to how universally awesome the game is when I can play it with my cousins together and we all have fun, and they're 11, 7 and 3 years old.



Batman: Arkham Asylum

At the time of release, I bought this only because of the great reviews and the sale price at launch. What I didn't expect was this game to live up to the hype. Batman is the definitive super hero game. It totally captures what it is to be Batman while being enjoyable throughout. I wholeheartedly recommend this game, even at full-price and I eagerly anticipate the recently announced sequel.


I would also like to put in an honourable mention to The Beatles: Rock Band, which was I think the definitive exclusive-to-one-band game. I'm sure that many more will come, but none will be made with the same love and care (and awesome music, but that's a personal taste) as the Beatles game was.

Are any of these my game of the year? No. My game of the year is one that came out very early in the year and I'm sure many people have forgotten to consider it because of that. Even with that against it, 2009 Game of the Year is a pretty easy choice for me to make. No game beat it in terms of the total time invested and total fun I had with it. It inspired me to get back into a genre of game that I felt abandoned me in 1995 and got me so back into it that I now actively follow the professional scene behind this game.

All things considered, my 2009 game of the year is Street Fighter IV.



I'm still an insanely huge fan of the Street Fighter II series. I've poured in countless hours of my life throwing hadokens and giving the business to M. Bison and company. To this day, I still play the original Street Fighter II. I even left a copy of the Super Nintendo version of the game at her house so I could play it when I'm visiting and she's doing something else. However, after Super Street Fighter II, fighting games got way too complicated and I stopped playing them completely. When Street Fighter IV was announced, it was being hyped up as a return to the series Street Fighter II roots, which is all I needed to know before jumping back on the bandwagon.

Did I get what I asked for? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I got a more accessible fighting game that I can play and enjoy at my skill level. No, I didn't get a carbon copy of Street Fighter II. I got an extremely modernized and fluid fighting game that at it's core brings back feelings of the classic. However, it doesn't come off as a rehash of Street Fighter II. Nostalgia be damned, Street Fighter IV is a better game in every respect.


I've invested over 200 hours into this game, mostly testing my chops against the best (and worst) XBOX Live has to offer. While the online systems weren't great, once you were in a fight, things generally ran as they should. I spent a lot of time trying to get better through training. It got me interested in trying BlazBlue (which is cool, but I'm still not sure I'm willing to invest the time I need to learn it). It also got me regularly following the tournament scene. It's been awesome watching the likes of Daigo and Justin Wong play this game at another level and then trying to implement their styles into how I play the game. It's almost like Street Fighter IV has transcended the world of "gaming" and moved into "sport" for me. Even almost a year after its release, the only thing I see stopping me from playing this is the release of Super Street Fighter IV in the spring.

Will there be enough new magic in SSFIV to make it my 2010 Game of the Year? We'll find out next year. But for now, I'll go back to catching scrubs on XBOX Live with my mean Raging Demon setups. Street Fighter IV is my game of the year.

During the early days of the World War II shooter (early 2000s), controlling a character from first person and shooting dudes was not really something I wanted to do. After games like Perfect Dark and Goldeneye sucked away hundreds of hours of my life, there wasn't really anything out there like it that I wanted to play. None of the FPS games of that generation appealed to me and I couldn't get a handle on playing these styles of games using dual analog sticks. Yes, that means I even missed Halo 1 and 2 in their prime. In the case of Call of Duty, I couldn't handle a dual stick FPS and I didn't want anything to do with WWII. Both of those elements combined for a series I had 0 interest in ever playing.

Ever since I invested in an XBOX 360 though, I've since played a number of FPS games. Heck, literally half of my game stash are FPS games, even though I still don't consider myself that big of a fan of the genre. By the time the Modern Warfare games took off, I had overcome my problem of dual sticks. But did I care for a more realistic war setting for a game? Not enough to go out and buy the game on my own.

As the hype train built up to critical mass for the release of Modern Warfare 2, I started to think that maybe I've been missing out on something special all along. I would often look around to see if I could get Modern Warfare 1 for cheap and at one point almost caved.

Luckily for me, my mom won a limited edition XBOX 360 with two controllers and a copy of Modern Warfare 2. I'm still not sure exactly what to do with the second 360, but I'm sure my brother and I will find a good use for it as well as all the other stuff it came with. We immediately busted the box open to play Modern Warfare 2 and see what the hype was all about.



First off, I should address my initial problem of being disinterested in the story/setting. Has the game changed my perception on "realistic" war? Not really, no. I still don't care that this takes place in the somewhat present. I read through the story of the first game and beat the campaign of MW2 and still don't care. Even playing through the "No Russian" level didn't really do anything for me. I appreciate the effort they put into this to try and make it as "Blackhawk Down" as they could, but it just doesn't stroke me the right way. Until I played as Soap, the game never really gives you a good sense of who you are, why you're hear and why you're doing the things you're doing. Ultimately, it feels like a Hollywood action movie that's big on excitement and short on substance.

Does any of this take away from the game for me? Not really, no. Behind it's setting and bombastic plot is arguably the best FPS game I've ever played. The core mechanics of moving and shooting guys feels just right. All of your shots feel like they have the appropriate impact and everything reacts the way you think it would. There's no shortage of guns and weaponry that adds layers of depth to the game. Do you arm yourself with a machine gun or a shotgun? Do you choose a rocket launcher and become vulnerable up close? Do you take a riot shield to protect you in exchange for a gun slot?

Movement from walking, running, crouching and crawling is easy enough to do and adds a lot to the game. Where the game takes it above and beyond are the extra weaponry, such as the AC130 and Predator missiles. Dropping a huge bomb or shooting hundreds of bullets from a helicopter at soldiers on the ground never felt so awesome.

In campaign mode, every stage is exciting to the point of ridiculousness. Every scenario seems to have been carefully thought out to provide maximum impact of adrenaline. Due to this planning, the story can take a back seat to riding snowmobiles or defending a burger joint from Russia. Maybe the experience would have more of an impact on me if I cared for the story, but I'm fine as is shooting guys.

The new mode introduced in Modern Warfare 2 is Spec Ops, which is sort of a mix of co-op campaign and Horde mode from Gears of War 2. Instead of a full blown co-op campaign or straight-up Horde mode, Modern Warfare 2 takes the best bits of campaign mode, adds co-op, and provides players with a scoring system to track your progress. While I still would have preferred straight-up co-op as well as this, Spec Ops is extremely fun to play and a great addition to the overall package.

As for multiplayer, not much more I can say about it. With the number of modes, options, perks and RPG elements, it's easily one of the best multiplayer experiences ever crafted. For me specifically, I think it's wonderful that 4-player split-screen was added. I know that the feature is antiquated and hardly anyone uses it anymore, but I still love using it when I have people over at the house. We all grew up on Goldeneye, so splitting a screen four ways is no big deal. The only thing that could have made it better is the inclusion of bots when you're not online.


Now that I know what this whole Modern Warfare thing is all about, I feel almost sad that I've been depriving myself of this experience for the past two years. Has it changed my mind enough to try the Treyarch Call of Duty games that come out every other year? I'm not sure if I would go that far, but I look forward to putting in many hours into this one.

Merry Christmas to you and yours. As a video game blog, I hope you found every game you wanted under the tree this year and that you provided your friends and loved ones with the gift of game as well. Between my brother and I, we received a bunch of games that I can't wait to dig into. Hopefully with my week off at work I can actually make a dent in them!

Having listened to the latest episode of the Joystiq podcast where they read and play clips of Joystiq readers share their favourite Christmas memories, I thought I would share one of mine with you.

It was the Fall of 1994. At the time, I was a regular reader of video game magazines, so I was fairly well informed as to what was happening in the video game scene at the tender age of 10. What caught me off guard though, was this personally-addressed video I received from Nintendo. Check out some of it below:



I knew of this game, but when I watched this video, it BLEW MY MIND. The graphics at the time were flat-out unbelievable. It looked really fun to play too. But man, THOSE GRAPHICS! In hindsight, maybe I was caught up in a pretty face and nothing more, but after seeing that video for the first time, I had to have that game.

Between that point and Christmas, I must have watched that video 100 times, eagerly hoping that Santa would drop a copy under my Christmas tree. I don't think I've ever eagerly anticipated anything that much in my life.

When the moment of truth finally happened and tearing open the wrapping paper revealed Donkey Kong Country, I was overcome with excitement. I popped that game in and played it all night.

Since then, I've had much better gifts, and in hindsight DKC may not be the best game ever. However, nothing (yet) has quite matched that moment in terms of sheer joy.

Feel free to share your gaming-related Christmas stories with me!

Last year, the original L4D rocked my socks hard as the ultimate zombie game. Gathering up three of your friends and attempting to survive the zombie apocalypse made it one of the best multiplayer experiences ever conceived. However, many also felt the game was a bit light on content.

Just one year later (and to the surprise and dismay of some) Left 4 Dead 2 arrives in stores with five new campaigns, four new survivors and a bevy of upgrades. For the most part, I feel like Valve has this down to a science.

At its core, L4D2 is what I wanted out of the first game. The core of what made the original is still here, augmented with a number of improvements. There are more campaigns, more guns, more special infected and more to enjoy.

The game comes with 5 campaigns, one more than the last and each chapter is generally longer than chapters from the first game. The new weapons do a great job of spicing things up, especially the melée weapons that are great up close and the grenade launcher that requires you to change your play style when you have it in your hands. Multiplayer is much more fleshed out with all of the campaigns being available for multiplayer as well as a bunch of new multiplayer modes.

For fans of the series and newbies alike, this package has a lot to offer and makes the old game pretty much obsolete. However, there are a few gripes I have with the game that keep it from perfection.



One of these gripes is more of a personal one. I really miss the original characters. Even though their absence from the sequel doesn't change the gameplay, I've grown attached to the original cast and the new cast just doesn't have the charm.

A gripe that does affect the gameplay is the difficulty balance. At normal difficulty, this game feels notably harder than the first, and at times downright cheap. There are times where you'll get rushed by a horde, boomer, spitter and hunter at the same time or some other combination that leads to insurmountable odds. A patch has been announced that supposedly includes some balance tweaks, so this may not be the case in the future.

Compounding these issues are your AI partners, who are dumber than doorknobs. They seem to have amazing accuracy when they decide to shoot, but they're prone to watching you get owned by a special infected for a while before deciding to help you out. In fact, they're even worse than your AI partners in the original. Try your best to play this with some friends and bypass the friendly AI completely.

In the wake of Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2 still manages to provide a FPS experience worth playing and easily surpasses the original as the ultimate zombie game. If you're looking to run through the zombie apocalypse, there's no better way to do it.

For those of you who regularly check out my blog to view the video game world through my perspective: my apologies. Life has been nothing short of hectic these last few weeks with a full-time job, Chistmas preparations and a personal life. I still play games on a regular basis. However, finding the time to write about them has been very difficult.

I've got a lot to write about, having played Left 4 Dead 2, Assassins Creed 2, Modern Warfare 2 and a bunch more. But I thought to get back on the saddle, I'd talk about the game that arguably has taken up most of my time; Monopoly on the iPhone.

Monopoly, really? Yes, really.

Let me preface for a minute though. Growing up, I was a HUGE Monopoly fan, as I often played the original board game with my friends at the time. We never really finished any of those games, but it was always fun. Around middle school, I got a copy of Monopoly for my computer and dropped an insane number of hours into it. Something about the experience of buying properties, throwing down hotels and sucking your opponents bank accounts dry is so fun to me. When I saw this on sale for $3, I had to have it.

What can I tell you about the game of Monopoly that you already don't know? Well, not much. Gameplay wise, it's Monopoly. It plays exactly how you would expect on an iPhone. The interface works pretty well once you've mastered the intricacies of doing what you want to do. By default, you have to shake your iPhone to roll the dice. I found this annoying and turned off the feature immediately.

As a multiplayer experience, it works really well. You can easily save your game to play again at any time. There is also online play, though I don't really see anyone sticking out an hour-or-more experience on their phone. At least the option is there.

My only gripes come from the AI. Odds are, you're going to spend the majority of your time playing this game with computer opponents. Regardless of what difficulty level you play on, it always feels like the computer is out to get you. Even in a 4-player game where three characters are AI, it really feels like three versus one. The computer goes about stacking the experience against you by making nonsensical deals that would only make sense if everyone was out to get you. Also, when playing against the computer, it often seems to have the best of luck while you land in jail 4 times in a row without passing "Go".

If you learn to play the game a certain way, you can still overcome these AI faults. Overall, Monopoly fans should find a lot to like here, especially when it's cheaper and more portable than the real deal.