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• John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Character

  Next time you start telling somebody about a game you were playing — not a puzzle game or anything equally abstract — pay attention to how you refer to what you were doing in the game. Are you saying, “Then I jumped on the goomba!” or are you saying, “Then my guy jumped on the goomba!” Is it you finding the boomerang or is it Link? Are you driving the car, making the basket, managing the farm? Or is it your proxy, that little character walking about when you push a button to the right, that window meant to be a human being’s field of vision? As much as I thought about open worlds in 2008, I spent just as much time wondering what role character plays in great game design. A great game character doesn’t need to be one specific thing. It can be you, a literal representation of how you see yourself physically and even spiritually. It can also be a suit for you to put on, a fiction that you can inhabit, a doorway into story that isn’t just different from your daily life, but quite literally impossible. There was no shortage of astounding games in 2008, but there were a handful that, for me, were wholly defined by how they let you inhabit their characters, and characters made both for and by the player. In my first look back at ’08, I mentioned how it was character that ultimately kept me from getting the most out of Grand Theft Auto IV. There was just too much dissonance in how Niko Bellic was represented. There were three Nikos. There was the Niko you see speaking in cutscenes, a haunted, practical man of honor, making a new life for himself in a new country by hunting down the demons of his past. There was the Niko you guided through the game’s structured missions, a ruthless, opportunistic murderer who would destroy anything and anyone for a buck. And, finally, the Niko that you played, the blank slate who could do anything in Liberty City, whether it was enjoying a nice walk on the beach or assaulting an international airport with nothing more than a motorcycle and a baseball bat. At no point in GTAIV did these three Nikos meld into a single character, and the constant contradictions between them made it impossible for me to enjoy the game after a certain point. Metal Gear Solid 4 and Yakuza 2 (my absolute favorite game of 2008) were two of last year’s greatest achievements precisely because they didn’t fall prey to GTAIV’s representational failures. Read More... Posted Jan 07 2009, 06:45 PM by John Constantine with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, the world ends with you, grand theft auto iv, playstation 3, nintendo ds, xbox 360, top ten, gta, playstation 2, mario, soul calibur, peter molyneux, yakuza, yakuza 2, best of 2008, soulcalibur iv, fable ii, kazuma kiriyu, old snake, goomba, solid snake

• Joe’s Top Ten Games of 2008 – Number One

  The official mandate has come down from the top—that it is December, and we all write about games, so we all have to pick some arbitrary number of them that we enjoyed above all others this year. I am taking on this task in the way of our forefathers, using their traditional number (10) and order (from great to most greatest). Games were chosen for this list using a highly scientific list of criteria, including but not limited to dopamine levels, blood alcohol content, tarot, and how badly I wanted a button making machine upon completion. This is my game of the year.   1. The World Ends With You This one surprised me too, but the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t justify not putting this vast, strange, innovative and compelling portable game at the top of my list. There’s a lot to think about here, so let’s dive right in. The World Ends With You is, at its heart, about cacophony. It’s about the cacophony of urban living—too many people, too many sounds, too many thoughts and banal life stories. It’s about the cacophony of capitalism—too many constantly swirling brands and fads, too many “friendships” borne purely of what you buy and what you own. It’s a game about surviving the barrage, about blocking out the white noise to find your own value in the meaninglessness. The story follows the meaning. It’s about a teenager who endures the constant assault on his senses by keeping it all out, and the strange, surreal events of a fatal game that forces him to confront and engage in life. But most interesting is that the mechanics of the game also follow along, and yet are somehow workable. Read More... Posted Dec 16 2008, 02:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: the world ends with you, nintendo ds, square-enix, joe keiser, top 10, top 10 of 2008

• Derrick's Top 13 Games of 2008 - Part 3

  Catching up? Read part 1 and part 2. 5 - The World Ends With You (DS): The insanely ambitious action-JRPG probably makes the most use of all the DS hardware has to offer of all DS software with the possible exception of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and even then The World Ends With You does it with so much more style and flair that the comparison seems woefully unfair. It's clear that Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts team put years of thought and research into what the DS could and could not do and the result is a game that breaks all expectations like so many angsty teenage hearts. It takes a truly great game to affect me outside of my gaming time, and much like Wii Fit got me thinking about jogging to the train every morning, The World Ends With You got me wearing pins on my bag for the first time since college, picking out just the right ones that may, someday, save my life in heated battle. Oh lord, did I love that dual-screened battle system... Read More... Posted Dec 11 2008, 02:30 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: the world ends with you, little big planet, playstation 3, nintendo ds, derrick sanskrit, wii, top ten, super smash bros, world of goo, super smash bros brawl, de blob, eden, pixeljunk, echochrome, pixeljunk eden, braid, cubello, top 10 of 2008, cicus atari

• 10 Games Nadia Played In 2008 Instead Of Working: The World Ends With You

  If my organs don't randomly decide to leap out my mouth and run down the street before I finish my Top Ten Games for 2008, you'll come to notice that I have a lot of Nintendo DS games put down as personal favourites. Could it be that I ride the subway often enough to feel like the kin of the Morlock? Mmmmmaybe.     The World Ends With You was probably the nicest surprise of the year for me. I cared very little for the game when it was in its development stages: one gaggle of Kingdom Hearts fangirls is all it takes to forever spoil your appetite for Tetsuya Nomura. So when I accidentally found myself with the game for review purposes, I threw a sulk in the style of The World Ends With You's orange-haired protagonist. He even started the adventure with an inner monologue about how the world in general could descend into Hell for all he cared, waah waah, Linkin Park. I'm a sullen bitch who bites people on the ankle when they prove me wrong, but it was a joy to discover just how wrong I was about The World Ends With You. Read More... Posted Dec 11 2008, 01:35 AM by Nadia Oxford with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: the world ends with you, nintendo ds, japan, square-enix, tetsuya nomura, kingdom hearts, nadia oxford, top 10, shibuya

• Good Grief: Snoopy DS

  Square-Enix has obviously found a great deal of success in the Nintendo DS with six Final Fantasy titles (including Tactics, Fables and Crystal Chronicles), four Dragon Quest titles, two Mana titles, The World Ends With You, Space Invaders Extreme, Arkanoid DS, Super Mario Hoops, and many others. With at least two more Dragon Quest titles on the way to the dual-screened portable, along with Kingdom Hearts, Valkyrie Profile, and Chrono Trigger, you might think the kids at S-E had just about run out of old and new properties to fit on those tiny game cards. Well you would be wrong, because Square-Enix is hard at work bringing Charles Schulz's classic comic strip to the party with Snoopy DS: Let's Go Meet Snoopy and His Friends! Read More... Posted Aug 06 2008, 05:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with no comments Filed under: the world ends with you, nintendo ds, derrick sanskrit, final fantasy, chrono trigger, square-enix, dragon quest, snoopy

• Whatcha Playing: Fallout (Metaphorically Speaking)

  Truth to tell, I’ve never played a Fallout game. The vast majority of my gaming career has been spent in front of a television, not a monitor, my hands clutching a controller instead of hovering over a keyboard. It’s not a point of pride, let me tell you. Not gaming on a PC throughout the ‘90s meant you were perpetually on the outside of the cutting edge, waiting for advancements to come to Nintendo, Sony, or whoever else’s systems sometimes years later. Deus Ex, Half-Life, Diablo, even Sierra’s King’s Quest V, all games I’ve gotten to try my hand at, eventually, when they were ported to a console, shadows of their former selves. It’s even kept me from really experiencing whole genres; I’ve never played a real-time strategy game for more than a few minutes and my aging laptop could barely run World of Warcraft when I tried it out in 2005. Since that year, though, consoles have started gaining on PCs as the place where developers make their greatest strides. It’s not too surprising. Consoles have turned into high-end computers themselves. Read More... Posted Jun 26 2008, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, the world ends with you, whatcha playing, wii fit, rock band, mega man, grand theft auto, final fantast vii, metal gear, diablo, deus ex

• The World Ends With Yahtzee

  It was starting to seem strange that all of our posts directing to The Escapist’s Zero Punctuation had volatile titles. Then I remembered that Yahtzee’s a volatile guy. His special brand of bile is pointed at The World Ends With You this week and, even though I have a serious fondness for the game, he makes some good points about its failures as a role-playing game. You’d think that role-playing would imply that you, y’know, play a role of some kind but, as Mr. Croshaw kindly points out, Japanese RPGs are pretty restrictive in that regard. This is why the silent, nameless protagonist of older RPGs is a sorely missed staple; it allowed you to inhabit that character despite your lack of influence over the story. That said, TWEWY’s story, not to mention its expertly translated dialogue, is pretty swell, so I don’t know what he’s bitching about. Hit the jump for good ol' fashioned ranting. Read More... Posted May 29 2008, 11:00 AM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, the world ends with you, yahtzee, zero punctuation, the escapist

• Whatcha Playing: With a Little Help From My Friends

  On the surface, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV and Square-Enix’s The World Ends With You don’t have much in common. Even beyond their base aesthetic differences, one steeped in realism and the other in hyper-cartoon exaggeration, their bustling urban landscapes are as different as the cultures that produced them. But as I’ve been working through both in the past week, I’ve found myself focusing on the same thing in both: building interpersonal relationships.     Read More... Posted May 09 2008, 11:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, the world ends with you, whatcha playing, grand theft auto iv