2009 Video Games Retrospective 2

The Ones That Got Away

World in Conflict: Soviet Assault
I just picked this one up from the still-ongoing Steam sale, and am quite pleasantly surprised. From the screenshots, I had thought it was an FPS with the photorealistic explosions and warplane in the background, and was all set up to do battle with crosshairs and iron sight until the point I started the tutorial where they taught me how to use a camera and gave me a unit of men to control. Oh.

It's set in an alternate modern day world where the USSR decide to invade. It's really an excuse to spread mass visual carnage across a civilian city like Seattle, while twisting around some story tropes for effect. This is the first time I've had a CO (Commanding Officer) who wasn't a gruff old Obi-Wan Kenobi or otherwise respectable figure to follow, but instead someone who has serious issues with taking all the credit for success, pushes blame to others, is a coward and is generally quite an annoying guy you wish the enemy would put a sniper bullet in, but you still have to follow him anyway cos he's your CO.

It'll tide me over while I sit and stare at the two Company of Heroes games for $15 each, and wait to come to a decision. Annoyingly enough, I own the first game but never quite found the time to finish it, but never did get the expansion that is now bound in the Gold edition, nor did I pick up the standalone Tales of Valour.

Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena
I anticipated this one quite eagerly. I went and bought the thing lock, stock and barrel. I haven't even made it on board the spaceship Dark Athena yet. Not for lack of trying, though. My momentum was quite abruptly killed when I got past 3-4 map levels and then hit some kind of loading bug which irrevocably crashed the game. Since this bugger is on a save checkpoint system, my attempts at reloading kept getting me into the no-progress crash point, and I never did get around to trying another "New Game" attempt, or a re-install.

The Ones I've Yet to Finish
Defense Grid: The Awakening - Nice tower defence. I'm currently trapped at that point in the levels where things have gotten exceedingly complex and require significant strategic thought I'm not yet willing to input and/or some game guide reading to understand the theory behind it, which usually means I stop playing the game instead of doing any of the above.

Plants vs Zombies - another tower defence. This one is more casual. I play it now and then when I'm in the mood. I'd make more progress on it had I put all the PopCap games on the same Steam login as my main account, but I had some sort of insane rationalization of letting my mom play the casual games collection after I was done in order to justify buying the ton-of-games pack. So now I have to log out and log in, which kind of puts a small crimp in the 'pick up and play' casual gameplay.

Fallout 3 - Y'know, I don't know what happened to this. I gave up chasing my dad into some big sewer maze by a Washington monument in favour of traipsing across the radioactive wilderness as an indepedent sharpshooter. I brought a wary alliance between a small town and a group of vampire-like mutants. I recall a microcosm of that between a skyscraper full of elitist human snobs and zombie-like mutants who hated each other, which I don't recall how it was resolved. I was hiking to some whacked out robot facility in the boondocks cos Moira told me to, and I'm suicidal that way, when I got vaguely bored with precision placement of somewhat ineffectual bullets into the brain circuitry of R2D2 lookalikes, saved my game and never came back.

The Ones That Are Still Pending
It's kind of ironic these are all the games that are now on heavy Steam offer. The worst part of it is, I bought quite a number of these fellas at the standard $50 SGD at Tec-Drome (marked with a *). I guess I better just treat it as a brick-and-mortar charity donation to keep the Uncle still going so that I have a place to get discounts on PC and console hardware.

Resident Evil 5 - Zombies! In Africa! At least, I think that's the idea. I've never tried a game in the Resident Evil series. Should get around to, some day. The problem with it sitting in my Steam list is that L4D occupies the 'zombies' niche in my brain over this.

Ghostbusters* - Essentially the Ghostbusters 3 movie. Or so I hear. If it's 80% as good as Batman was, it should be worth playing. Haven't gotten around to installing it, and my hard disk is approaching full though.

Prototype* - Looks like an insane action blend of a superhero and Assasin's Creed, mixed with some shapeshifting and a dose of GtA. How it actually plays, I have no idea. It's on the 'get around to installing someday' list.

The Last Remnant - Some sort of Final Fantasy-esque inspired mix with combat you don't actually control. I have no idea how this thing will play and how long I'll last.

Dead Space* - This was a leftover 2008 game. I have the box. It's just not installed. How stupid is that? I could have just waited until the Steam blowout sale. I hear it's pretty good, but I dunno, I haven't been in the mood for anything Space Doom-supernatural themed (or World War themed, for that matter) for ages because the genre is all worn out.

Mirror’s Edge - 2008 too. Bought cheap on Steam. Due to visit some day when I want a non violent vertiginous speedrun game, I guess.

The Ones I Haven't Bought Yet
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
Left 4 Dead 2
I'm positive these two games are good. I liked the originals. I'm just not willing to buy more of the same at full price. Steam, mark them down faster!

Anno 1404 – Dawn of Discovery
Anno 1701 - 1701 A.D.
I haven't played a good city-builder economic sim in forever. The Total War series is a decent mix, and visually quite spectacular in terms of big set piece battles and tactical maneuvering in formation blocks, but it is so interminably slow. I wanted to try X3 as a space economic sim, but I couldn't figure out how to fly the goddamn spaceship when it plopped me in the game. (I picked up X2 in the hopes that it is less complex.) The Anno series looks quite fascinating with all its resource chains, but they're still so expensive.

Tropico 3
I have warm fuzzy memories of the first Tropico. In fact, I picked up the first two games on offer and quite enjoyed messing around with them for a while, but y'know, eyebleeding pixelated graphics vs prettier graphics and Steam achievements... Again, the price is not too thrilling yet.

Command and Conquer: Tiberium Series
A long long time ago, I played Command and Conquer: Red Alert (1, 2, or 3) I have no idea which. It was at the behest of a JC friend, who had unexpectedly taken a shine to the game, while refusing to play anything else RTS-related, such as the (imo) far superior Warcraft or Starcraft variants at the time. I found the cutscenes hopelessly cheesy, had no major clue as to what most of the units actually did, but somehow through beginner's luck (or the application of cross-game RTS principles), demolished her soundly in the first and only multiplayer game we played. I seem to recall nukes. I never did get asked to play another game. :/

(Some people find it very hard to have their illusions shattered in RTSes, I guess. After all, they did so well in singleplayer! To lose to a self-confessed Red Alert newbie! Me, I'd always assumed at least 50% of the people online could RTS better than me, if not 75%. I may have gone through one or two singleplayer game levels for research purposes prior to that fight though. :P)

But anyhow, from that impromptu trial wherein I was actually discovering the tech tree of the side I was playing mid-game, I was not impressed with the series theme or its gameplay, and went on to be a Blizzard 'craft fangirl instead, striking off anything with C&C in its name as not worth bothering with. There would be far superior modern world RTSes in the future.

It wasn't until the recent advertisements for Command & Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight that have registered the fact that there is a sci-fi themed Tiberium series in the same vein as the Red Alert modern-theme series. This sounds a touch more interesting, but I am finding it quite difficult to even locate the games. Missing on Steam for the lose. :/

Heavy Rain
Can. Not. Wait.

Feb 16, 2010 cannot come too soon.