The Second Annual Coint and Plick Poll: ILG’s Best Video Games of 2008 - Part 2: The Top Forty!

s1ocks, you're a mind reader!

― Also, the game will have toilets. (forksclovetofu), Thursday, February 19, 2009 4:47 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that's bizarre forks - i coulda swore the pure entry was already there when i posted it! maybe i AM!!

Thanks ZS; I'm in the same boat you are!

S1ocks I was joshin' ya; I deleted the Pure to do some editing and then threw it back up; your comment came in the interim.

Is Pure the game different at all from Pure the demo? I found the demo fun but unremarkable.

not really that different from what i recall. adds a "soup up your vehicle" thing that is remarkably deep but im not going to lie to you, nobody is playing the game for the four wheeler construction sim. lots of the other tracks are pretty stunning, but i thought the demo track was pretty sweet too.

I think what that game nails is the great matrix-y moments of weightlessness and racing to finish the trick madness that leads as often as not to massive wipeouts. Sure, it's ridic pretty; but the gameplay felt really clean and engaging to me. Again, I'll forward the tired analogy; at it's best, Pure felt like an SSX sequel to me.

#18: GRID (PS3) – 30 points – 4 votes – 1 GAME OF THE YEAR vote
Official game site

http://ve3dmedia.ign.com/images/02/89/28930_normal.jpg

Ledge: ***LOVE*** drifting and am pretty decent at it; the muscle car stuff and road races in general are great (although often pretty damn tough). I don't dig and am bad at the proper racetrack events. The Le Mans race is my worst nightmare.

http://www.playfuls.com/images/news/racedriver_grid.jpg

Cozwyn: This game is heaps of fun and gorgeous. The tracks are great, the cars all feel different, there’s lots of fun modes and a deep enough career system for an arcade racer. Everything feels very fast; heaps of fun

Ste: I'm so psychologically pissed sometimes when it comes to this game; as soon as I get into first place, I just start sweating madly and lose concentration, followed by usually performing the most horrendous accident ever. I thought it was great, a lot more fun than any other racing game I’ve tried on the PS3.
I love just doing that rewind shit on my crashes, it's so surreal. The radio commentary is fantastic and it's great how they tell you who is doing what on a race, sometimes in a tone like you're supposed to know who the hell they are. "Donny Taylor just span out". OH NO NOT DONNY!

http://www.techlivez.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/grid.jpg

Jeff Le Vine: I see the game has made a lot of top ten lists, so obviously people liked it, but I probably hated this like no other I played this year - which is weird, because I really enjoy DiRT. Even with a joystick I just couldn't get used to the slippery way the vehicles handle and bounced off things. It hit a weird middle ground, not arcade enough and not sim enough. I also hated the nickname thing. It just seems to me that there are so many other better driving game options out there right now, even on a console.
I just threw this game in the garbage. Feeling a lot better now :)

#17: Far Cry 2 (PS3) – 31 points – 3 votes
Official game site

http://freenet-homepage.de/mk-hawk/bilder/FarCry2g.jpg

Iroquois Pliskin: Such a subtle game, both in terms of its environmental charms and its unsettling narrative. Beyond the generally awe-inspiring attention to graphical detail manifest in the flora and fauna and climate of Leboa-Sako, Clint Hocking’s Africa-set magnum opus abounds in the small touches that communicate an authentic sense of place: patches of leaf-filtered sun on the floor of your safe house, bugs on your windshield, the golden luster of the savanna grass at sunset. And having to look down at your map while driving so uncannily replicated the hazards of real-life vehicular navigation that you forgave the frequent mishaps it caused.

Developer-Reviewer discussion

http://z.about.com/d/compactiongames/1/0/z/5/farcry2.jpg

Mitch Krpata: Sober, thoughtful, and mature -- three words we don't usually associate with a first-person shooter. Because its game world is so big, Far Cry 2 can seem slow-paced. You'll cross the map to accept a mission and then have to turn around and go back to accomplish it. As smaller firefights erupt along the roadways and at guard shacks and enemy safe houses, a simple trip might take half an hour or more. The sparsity of checkpoints means that the death of your character can erase significant progress. Yet the game casts a spell as you go deeper. Detours become ever more alluring. And if you lose your bearings in the wilds of Africa, well, that's the point.

http://de.static.ggl.com/CB/images/news/2008/far_cry_2.jpg

Jeff LeVine: I agree it has problems but what sandbox game doesn't? On the plus side, the world created is a pretty impressive environment to wander around in. You can go by foot through miles and miles of bush, ride various cars and take boats around. I like the pacing. It seems a little slower, a little more casual than the average sandbox. The various mission scenarios are fun to fight your way through. The game just feels like a ‘B’ though and in a season this packed with ‘A’ games, I could understand why people would skip it for now.

#16: Civilization: Revolution (PS3/360/DS) – 37 points – 5 votes
Official game site

Meg Busset: I've had Civ: Rev for about four weeks and am really enjoying it. Playing on King level at the moment but might shift up to Emperor and see how that goes. Some of the Civilizations are so superior to the others it's embarrassing. Take the Romans; once you get going on building wonders there's no stopping the culture victory. Only criticism so far is that archers are such a good defensive unit that it seems pointless going to war in the early stages of the game. I just defend until I get combustion then crank out tank armies and twat everyone.

http://media.teamxbox.com/games/ss/1775/1184991323.jpg

MPx4A: I would prefer to just be able to carry on after winning to see how things pan out. I felt a bit bad for nuking Delhi. I think nukes fuck up the surrounding area and damage your culture rating but I never really got to face the consequences because I won the next turn… even though Gandhi was still giving me all this "I'm taking that pile of mutant-infested rubble back real soon, son" type shit. It is kind of stupid that you click stats and all you get is reverse ordered descriptions of milestones, interspersed with painfully slow scrolling credits and repeated messages about how you beat the game. Basically, once you have one infantry army with a couple of upgrades then no amount of tanks, artillery or bombers will shift your capital city but you have to hope you get lucky with the great people and the cash rolling in. I got within three turns of the World Bank when the Greeks, who invented gayness, built the fuckin’ UN. This game can be kind of relaxing but the way the computer constantly declares war in really snide terms (even when you're just off being polite and cultural in some remote corner of the world) subtly reminds you that people are dicks, all the time. Even the sim ones.

http://www.pcworld.ca/pcworldContentimages/3civilization_revolution_982ed783-4e0a-4265-86c1-eaef563393da.jpg

Roberto Spiralli: It's a lot of fun and very intuitive and easy to play but they went a little too far with the console oversimplification. Not having unhappy citizens or hunger improves the flow of the game but takes the 'management' element out of city management somewhat. It is really REALLY fucking easy playing versus the computer. I think this will have close to zero one player replay value after about a week, though I do think it could be top fun on multiplayer. I need to convince my two IRL Civ-playing friends to trade in their 360s and join me on a PS3.
EA puts a regular single player vs CPU game up on the network each week and you play it like you would a regular game. If you beat it, your score gets compared with the rest of the world or region or whatever. I guess they realized that coordinating a three hour block of multiplayer time between pals might be tough for a lot of people so they went with a new approach.

http://dsmedia.ign.com/ds/image/article/851/851310/civilization-revolution-20080211044643810.jpg

Kingfish: Civ on a console just seems odd, maybe just because of the lack of a mouse. I played this game forever before I finally went ahead and tried to nuke something. So hardwired against doing so.

http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/857/857928/civilization-revolution-20080307043527016_640w.jpg

Euler: I love this game. I just won on Emperor for the first time and it was definitely way more challenging than king. I wish the endgame were longer so I could benefit from the late-game techs and wonders more but some of the scenarios help with that (e.g. Beta Centauri).

DG: Totally pwn3d Alpha Centauri yesterday, which means I'm on track to have my first go on Civ: Rev sometime around 2017.

HA my GRID comment makes me sound like a dick. "I like what I'm good at and hate what I'm shit at!". Added Audiosurf and Far Cry 2 to list of shit I wanna check out 4 real. And gotta say, sterling work, Forks - am actually enjoying the slow pace here, proper good old-fashioned delayed gratification.

oi who is writing some of these comments? like far cry specifically? cos they make it sound v intersting when i thought that nobody liked that game!

So CivRev on the DS is basically advance wars?

oi who is writing some of these comments? like far cry specifically

Jeff's a regular poster on ILG, Mitch Krpata writes about games for the Boston Phoenix, Paste and his blog insult swordfighting, iroquois pliskin is the nom de plume of the guy who does versus clu clu land. They all voted in the poll.

I love Insult Swordfighting.

bump?

lol SFIV?

ok i have acquired a copy of civ/rev and it is totally not basically advance wars, 100% wrong there

kind of regretting not putting Pure in my #1 spot. played it again this weekend for a while and it is GOLDEN. also digging the way it autopopulates the bottom of your screen with best laps from people on your friends list before each event, sort of the statsgeekery equivalent of a ghost to compete against.

that said, forks 1000% OTM re: terrrrrrrible soundtrack, really stunningly dreadful.

yeah I think I voted Pure #2, and also played this weekend again and loved it. Freestyle mode is way more fun than I'd expect, esp. in multi. It's a pity there are so few people on multi on xbla; I play with my brother weekly and we've yet to find anyone else on the server to play with.

Forks, this is incredible. Great round up. Thanks very much.

Before we finally crack the top fifteen, it's time to pause for a page from the 'can't-please-everyone-all-the-time' file. When I asked people to submit their votes, I also asked them to name their "most disappointing" game of the year. This wording was intentionally vague; I didn't necessarily want to hear what folks thought the WORST game of the year was, I wanted to see what got under their skin and annoyed them. Unsurprisingly, virtually all the games mentioned as most disappointing also made the countdown. Here's a selection of responses to our hall of shame:

Brilliam: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots
I loved MGS, MGS2, and MGS3... in that order. What made them great was that they pushed the definition of player and console and game to the absolute limit. Not only does MGS4 fail to do this in the same way, it's also got one of the most irritatingly preposterous scripts in the history of script…and not in a way that's amusing, like MGS1 and 2. Definitely one of the most interesting games I played and beat this year, but hardly one of the top 20.

Edgertor: Fable II
Though it was my first real RPG, Fable II ended up giving me the feeling I’d wasted my time. The 'relationships' you have are stupid and superficial, the customizing dopey and the only good thing about it is that you get a dog... and (if you’re good) he gets fat and blonde after forty hours. Who wants a fat blonde dog?

Cozwyn: Grand Theft Auto IV
it braek my haert : (

Abanana: Professor Layton and The Curious Village
http://www.kelliebob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/200802131.jpg

Forksclovetofu: Spore
Fable II captured my girlfriend’s attention, not mine. No More Heroes looked great and played poorly. GTA IV could’ve been retitled ‘Arduous FetchQuest 08’ for all the pointless running around it forced me to do. Mirror’s Edge left me cold from the demo. L4D requires gamer friends on your schedule. There were various and sundry disappointments on game systems for me this year, but nothing was so completely ‘ennnhhhh’ as the much anticipated and greatly depressing Spore. I wanted the ultimate god game and instead got to run around collecting whiskers and earlobes on a beach while avoiding giant gorillas… and that’s not even as fun as it sounds! When the best part of the game is your character creator, something’s gone wrong in Wrightland.

Mitch Krpata: Mirror's Edge
Rarely have I played a game that seemed so self-contradictory, especially one with such capacity for greatness. But it almost forced you to play it in a sub-optimal way in order to progress. I hated every second I spent with this game and it's like a six-hour game. There weren't all that many seconds to hate. Intellectually, I appreciated what Mirror's Edge was doing, and that's why I kept booting it up with a sense of optimism -- optimism that was destroyed within minutes of beginning any new play session. On a gut level, I just couldn't stand the game. I swore at it. I stared in disbelief. I came close to re-enacting the control pad stress test on more than one occasion. And lest you think it's just because I was bad at it -- and I was very bad it -- the game was designed in such a way that I couldn't help but blunder my way through it without ever having to master it. It was the worst of both worlds.

Nhex: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin
Sad because it's still the same great core game as the other excellent AW games but Nintendo went with a more serious and dark tone, removing so much of the charm and personality of the series. I can totally understand why: they did three critically acclaimed, great games that the general public didn't seem to care about, so they made an earnest attempt to broaden their reach (ironically by narrowing it to appeal to the "core" gamer, with a dystopian setting), but it doesn't quite work. It's a shame this series hasn't really been a massive, popular breakout hit - it's still very accessible.

EZSnappin: Little Big Planet
I love the idea of LBP and its community creations but the platforming is a floaty, imprecise mess. An absolutely stunning and charming and magical game that I only wish was fun to play.

Iroquois Pliskin: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots
Not only was it barely a game in the latter half, it simply lacked so much of the inspired and imaginative gameplay that made the previous games in the series such classics.

John Justen: Fable II
Where do I start? Simply put, Fable II is a good-looking, ambitious game with frustrating mechanical flaws and nearly irredeemable gameplay due to its terrible core design flaws. There is enough to like about this game that I still put it in last place on my top ten but the myriad problems make it infuriating. The "vault" mechanic is just straight up broken. If I can leap 100 feet down from a cliff, I should be able to jump off any fucking ledge I come across where I can see the ground. The last time I remember this many “find-the-sweet- spot-and-move-until-you-can-do-what-you-want” difficulties was with the old LucasArts games. Having a game built on social interaction with NPCs and then making those NPCs idiots is bullshit. Making the logos for the expressions in the quick menu incomprehensible and indistinguishable is no good. Having your character’s reactions change at the last minute so that instead of giving a thumbs up you do a bloodthirsty roar for no reason - not okay. The fact that I made more money on the first level of woodcutting than I did in the first fifty treasure chests I found is insane. Implementing a sale mechanic for the shops that makes it possible for you to sell the items you just bought back to that exact same place for a considerable profit the very next day is not an "exploit". It is bad game design and it makes any actual hard work unrewarding and pointless. The shitty control issues and moronic terrain issues are counterbalanced by the fact that the game looks great and that the dog is adorable and actually offers a lot of great mechanical elements (the dig spots, training, etc.) but the damnable, inescapable problem with this game is that there seems to have been no effort to make the basic structure of the in-game world make any sense.

Jamescobo: Resistance 2
PROTIP: I hear this game has invisible enemies.

CraigG: Me
There's been so many games that haven't been as good as I expected but none of the ones I was REALLY hyped for were shit. I was looking forward to Fallout, which was better than I expected, I was eager for Mother3 which delivered in abundance. I guess one game that I really hoped would be better - not so much that the game is flawed, but that it didn't "grab" me in the way I'd hoped, was Super Mario Galaxy and that's an '07 release. Still, I kept hoping for a 3D Mario that gets me like Mario 64 did when it came out and I actually do think SMG is better than Mario 64. So I suppose my biggest disappointment is... myself, really. I don't understand why I don't love Galaxy more than I do. :'(

Lamp: Persona 4
Not because of the game, but because it got stolen from the lobby of my building the last week of December, presumably by one of my neighbors. Who else would be able to get into my building and the area where the post office dude leaves Amazon packages? Sure, Fable II fucking sucked but this is some next level bullshit. IMO richass brokers stealing my Aliens boxset and Xbox games is a sign of the times 4 real.

Top fifteen on the way soon.

forks please start a new thread for top 15

o rly? okay, will do.

ya antexit just told me this is crashing his firefox and it really slows mine down too! some reason youtubes are super heavy

Weird; loads fine for me(after letting it sit for about thirty seconds or so) when I login anonymously.

lol @ Lamp re: Persona 4, that sucks but led to the most awesome rational for "biggest disappointment"

New thread starting here:
The Second Annual Coint and Plick Poll: ILG’s Best Video Games of 2008 - Part 3: The Top Fifteen!