The Quixotic Engineer

This last week, I was invited to take part in an incredibly ambitious podcast by Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer. As part of his gamers confab series (in which I was kindly invited to participate back in September), he has invited nineteen fellow bloggers to talk about their personal favourite games of 2008. Amazingly, the twenty of us picked twenty different titles, showing just how diverse this year in gaming has been.

The three volumes run for about an hour each, which may seem a bit daunting if you’re not a regular podcast listener. However, the discussion is insightful, entertaining, delightful and well worth your time. You can find my conversation with Chris Dahlen and Michael “Sparky” Clarkson in the second half of Volume 2.

• Download Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3 [MP3]
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Subscribe to the feed

I also wrote up my top 10 games of 2008 for Snackbar, as part of their staff picks series. Once again there was very little selection consensus, a stark contrast to 2007’s focus on titles such as Bioshock and Portal. A pessimist (*cough*) might say that this is a symptom of the large number of “great but flawed” titles released this year. I choose to believe that this is the natural progression of video games maturing as a medium. The audience for games is no longer homogeneous, and neither are our tastes.

My second review over at Snackbar Games is now up, wherein I compare Sam & Max: Season One for the Wii to a sitcom. I doubt I’m the first to describe it as such (the name and format certainly lend themselves to the comparison), but I think I’ve made a convincing case as to why it is apt.

Snackbar Games – Sam & Max: Season One Review

On an unrelated note, I know a number of us are compiling “best games of 2008” lists this month (some happily, others not so much), but a year is a long and memory is short. I can hardly remember what February was like, let alone what games were released that month.

With this in mind, I took a moment to scrape the Giant Bomb release calendar and compile a master list of games released in 2008. I hope its handy in jogging your memory about some of the great titles released last winter (hint: No More Heroes).

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of Sam & Max: Season One via Snackbar Games.

As often happens with hyped-up games, Mirror’s Edge fell short of many people’s lofty expectations. Some complained about its length (I managed to complete the story mode in two solid evenings of gaming). Others criticized the cliché-ridden story, which was seemingly written with the philosophy that: “Sudden betrayals are shocking, the more the better!” However, I think most people would have overlooked these flaws if DICE had managed to nail the gameplay. Unfortunately, Mirror’s Edge is the victim of a compromised vision.

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This Wednesday I attended Gamma 3D, a game design event being thrown by Kokoromi and connected to the Montreal International Game Summit. There is serious indie talent at these events; last year’s Gamma 256 featured the much-discussed Passage among others. The theme of this year’s competition was 3D stereoscopy, explained thusly by the organizers:

“It’s very typical of games right now to toss [3D stereoscopy] in as some back-of-the-box bullet point,” says Kokoromi co-founder Heather Kelley. “We wanted to throw it out there as an actual design challenge, and not treat it as some buzzword.”

Adds co-founder Phil Fish, “Right now, Ubisoft is working on a 3D stereoscopic game, and we’re seeing it more in TV and film. So we asked the question: is it worthwhile? Is there anything you can really do with it?”

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I’m roughly a dozen hours into Fallout 3, and so far my experience has been very entertaining but highly inconsistent. Every flash of brilliance, moment of wonderful storytelling and interesting nook of the vast capitol wasteland has been marred by stiff character animations, sloppy A.I. and show-stopping bugs. I thought I might take a moment to chronicle some of the ups and downs on the roller coaster of quality that is Fallout 3.

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