The strange thing about the way we delineate time is that repetition — twelve hours, seven days, twelve months, rinse, wash, repeat — tends to make everything feel cyclical. Come January, we stare forward, looking at the flow of hours to weeks like a one-way street full of fresh landmarks, memories, and conversations. But when we end up back at December, there’s a collective and pervasive sense of déjà vu, an overwhelming feeling that we’re suddenly back in the exact same shoes we were the last time it was December, and we take stock of everything we saw upon that fresh stretch of road as though we’ve come back to the start. We weigh the fruits of time’s passage and immediately compare them to what came before. Maybe that’s why those of us so obsessed with pop culture, who worship at the altar of creation and consumption, gravitate towards retrospective lists; we just can’t seem to help looking back right before we look forward again.
I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out just how to quantify the videogames of 2008, wrestling back and forth with just what to say. There are games that, by the end of my time with them, I downright loathed, that I never wanted to play again, but that I couldn’t shake out of my brain thanks to one aspect of their design. I never managed to finish Grand Theft Auto IV because I was so repulsed by its schizophrenic depiction of character when it put so much emphasis on story (and more on that later.) GTAIV’s Liberty City, though, is something I still think about on an almost daily basis. It is one of the most beautiful and strange creations I’ve ever seen, something more than a photograph, sculpture or film thanks to the way you are allowed to inhabit it. The game’s goals are frustrating to achieve, its characters more personality than people, and its story is at odds with its interactivity. But its world is astounding, just real enough to be familiar, and just other enough to warrant exploring it when its real world inspiration is right outside your door.
I hated Grand Theft Auto IV by the time I stopped playing it, but I have to bring it up here because 2008 was the year of the Open World for me. The GTA model – providing the player with an interactive space they’re free to move about, choosing traditionally structured tasks at their leisure to “win” the game – is a staple of 21st century gaming that finally came of age. Before this year, the sandbox game was the domain of action-shooters (Crackdown, Mercenaries) and Western RPGs (Elder Scrolls) exclusively, but the past twelve months were nicely bookended by games that broadened the sandbox horizon. In January, Burnout Paradise took GTA’s driving and insane stunts into the world of pure racing in a lush fantasy cityscape and No More Heroes had you play around in a maddening post-modern commentary on the form, stripping mundane side-missions of their artifice and transforming them into chores. This fall, Far Cry 2 finally nailed the open-world in first-person and, for the first time since Half-Life, raised the bar for immersion in both of the genres it’s founded on.
Grand Theft Auto IV, No More Heroes, Far Cry 2 and Burnout Paradise all share more than an open world structure and driving mechanics; they’re all incredible games in spite of their actual goals. Open world games of the past bored me because their spaces were never gripping enough to be engaging beyond their concrete missions/levels, but these games are all worth playing just to be inside of them. Rainy-days along the river in GTAIV, going faster and faster down a highway in Burnout, spotting some gazelles on the edge of the desert in Far Cry, and realizing that Goichi Suda is actually fucking with you when you wipeout after a hard turn on your motorcycle in No More Heroes’ Santa Destroy. These are the moments that will stick with me by the time I come full-circle again in December of 2009.
Games of 2008: No More Heroes, Far Cry 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Burnout Paradise
Related Links:
10 Games Nadia Played in 2008 Instead of Working
Joe’s Top Ten Games of 2008
My Top 10 of 2008 in No Particular Order
Derrick's Top 13 Games of 2008