The Dord of Darien

Fire seven different dudes from A.V. Club

I figured, hey, A.V. Club is an Onion property, right? So this is probably satire, right? Stephen says not so. So I guess this insane list of the 15 best video games of the last decade is on the level. Are you ready for some pretentious drivel about video games? Well, fine, but I’ll FJM it up for everybody’s benefit, and then we’ll take a look at some fun facts about this article at the end. Now what do you say?

Well, suck it up. We’re doing it anyhow.

We keep coming back to videogames for the same reasons we always have. Or do we?

Or do we? Or… do we? [crash chord]

Games in 2009 look considerably different now than they did in 2000, and not just because the graphics have improved.

Quick spoiler for the benefit of the impatient: on the evidence presented in the article, yeah, actually, it’s just because the graphics have improved.

What was once a lonely pursuit has gotten social, whether by way of a party-friendly round of Rock Band or a late-night online session of Modern Warfare.

You hear that, Ultima Online and Everquest and Goldeneye and Starsiege: Tribes? You were all lonely, lonely games that lonely nerds played in their lonely living rooms and never ever had any social interaction.

The thrills have gotten more complicated, too. Even the shoot-’em-ups aren’t just about shooting ’em up anymore. (Or at least not shooting ’em up without some careful planning.)

You hear that, Half-Life and No One Lives Forever and Goldeneye again? You were all about shooting ’em up and required no strategy or planning whatsoever. Unlike the number one best game of the last ten years, which was known for the hefty strategy involved.

As the ’00s close, The A.V. Club offers our picks for the 15 games that pushed things forward.

It didn’t even take one full paragraph before the point of this article changed from "best games" — like it says in the title — to "games that pushed things forward," which means nothing and lets you get away without doing any research or thinking, and thereby allows you to begin the meat of your article by saying:

15. SSX 3 (EA Sports BIG, 2003)

What?

After the first two games in the SSX snowboarding series spread their action across a disparate bunch of wacky, gimmick-heavy tracks, it seemed like an unwise departure for SSX 3 to condense its competitions onto a single mountain.

For those of us just tuning in, A.V. Club has named the third installment in an EA sports series of snowboarding games the fifteenth best game of the last decade. For reference: there are no other sports games on this list. Ergo, SSX 3 is the best sports game made in the last ten years. And get this: it only had one mountain! Which I guess matters for some reason. Me, I don’t care if it tells me all the tracks are on the same mountain or if it tells me they’re all on different mountains. It’s kind of… the same.

But SSX had always been about maintaining your flow—whether racing at top speed or executing elaborate mid-air tricks—and SSX 3 extended that sensation of flow to the entire experience.

Criterion for video game quality: must extend the sensation of flow.

Instead of hopping between individual competitions, SSX 3 instills the sense of a single journey through a gorgeous, tactile landscape.

This is a snowboarding game. You know, snowboarding? And the A.V. Club is praising it for instilling the sense of journey and extending the sensation of flow, neither of which, incidentally, is a thing.

With only two lackluster follow-ups since 2003, the series appears to be in cold storage, a baffling case of neglect given that SSX 3 holds up better than any other sports game of its generation.

And now they say it straight-up. SSX3: best sports game of the last ten years.

14. The Sims (Electronic Arts, 2000)

A sensible choice. Let’s see what babble they write in the justifications, though.

More than anything else, The Sims is about breaking the simulation-game genre down to its most basic components.

Is that what it’s about? I thought it was about trying to get digipeople to have sex and then getting bored and inventing new ways of killing them.

By keeping the focus on a single household, the game allows for a previously unimagined amount of detail in your characters’ personalities, looks, and life paths.

If by "unimagined about of detail" you mean that there’s a lot of detail the game doesn’t bother to imagine, you would appear to be right. Since, frankly, the graphics weren’t impressive even in 2000.

It doubles as an exercise in architectural design, as the engine for building and furnishing homes gave players free rein in building the home where they spend all their time with their characters. While some condemned The Sims as simply a virtual dollhouse, the ability to build people from the ground up to watch them grow, build families, and achieve their goals

… It’s in here somewhere…

or capriciously ruin their lives

There it is!

provides nearly endless hours of play to satisfy control freaks.

Apparently, only control freaks will enjoy this game. Thanks for being assholes, A.V. Club.

13. Ninja Gaiden (Tecmo, 2004)

A questionable, but not indefensible, choice. Let’s watch them indefend it.

No other form of media values doing cool shit over logic and common sense to the extreme that videogames do.

The people who wrote this article are not familiar with: books, movies, magazines, comic books, television, radio plays, or the entire expressionist and surrealist movements.

The quintessential example of style over substance is 2004’s reboot of the arcade and NES-era classic Ninja Gaiden.

The quintessential pretentious backhanded compliment is: that.

The head-scratching story of ninja Ryu Hayabusa appears to pride itself in making as little sense as possible.

The people who wrote this article are not familiar with: video games and everything ever said, written, or filmed about ninjas.

The game also prides itself on its brutal difficulty. Only the most dedicated gamers ever saw it through to its final, nonsensical battle, but those who did were treated to a unforgettable dose of the nutty, old-school challenges that have become painfully rare in the games of recent years.

Criteria for video game quality: must be hard, must not make any sense, and must lack substance.

12. Braid (Microsoft Game Studios, 2008)

Oh, I can’t wait for this. This is going to be amazing.

Few game designers can speak so lucidly or argue so forcefully about games as Jonathan Blow.

Comedy name aside, he’s actually kind of a babbling nutcase who wastes most of his breath on complaining about commercialism and rationalising the disconnect between that and how he sells products for a living.

His lectures and interviews would be valuable enough if he hadn’t brought his talent to bear on Braid.

Well… no. You never would have heard of him. Which is why you never had heard of him until Braid came out. Do you see?

The game’s signature success is that it conveys a set of ideas that Blow could only explain through the game itself.

Well… no. The game’s signature success is that it has one really bitchin’ level. The set of ideas that it conveys are actually sort of lame. "Nuclear bombs are bad" doesn’t count as a bold artistic statement in the year 200fucking8. The perspective thing is like first-year philosophy student stuff. No, the good thing is the way the perspective idea is conveyed in the game’s one awesome level — not the idea itself, mind you, but the presentation.

Players are introduced to new ways of moving through time and space, which they come to understand by mastering Blow’s puzzles.

New way of moving through time == rewinding if you miss a jump like in that Prince of Persia game.
New way of moving through space == running and jumping like in that game with the plumber and the mushrooms.
Mastering puzzles == looking up on the internet that you need to stand there and wait two hours for that cloud to move over to where you can jump on it.

It’s a short game, as Blow never wastes time with redundant content.

Except for the final world, which is the exact same level four times in a row.

And it’s difficult, but Blow implores you not to look up the answers.

Well fuck him. If he doesn’t want me to look up the answers, he has a responsibility not to make the puzzles as gigantically lame as "stand there for two hours waiting for the cloud to move."

As the only true indie on this list, Braid epitomizes some of the scene’s clichés: the text, the music, and David Hellman’s illustrations are lovely but precious, and the auteur behind the game is demanding.

True Indie: the story of one man’s quest to make a mind-numbingly pretentious platform game. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Jonathan Blow. Also starring the staff of A.V. Club as some dude giving Arnold Schwarzenegger a really sloppy blowjob.

"Auteur," incidentally, is French for "bullshit hippie internet cred."

But Braid also demonstrates how successfully a tiny team can marry intellectual rigor to addictive, intuitive gameplay.

Successfully enough, apparently, to have made the best platformer of the last ten years. Because there are no other platformers on this list.

11. Advance Wars (Nintendo, 2001)

Fire Joe Morgan once did a routine about a theme park called Left Field Land. If I recall, it had a fried chicken restaurant called The Fowl Pole, and a waterslide into a giant swimming pool shaped like Ted Williams’ torso. And no women or minorities were allowed into the park.

I only mention this because I’m pretty sure this choice came directly out of Left Field Land.

(My joke: 2/10)

Advance Wars hit store shelves on the inopportune street date of September 11. And at first blush, its candy-colored, carefree approach to warfare seemed horribly out of sync.

How inconvenient! If only the game had launched one day earlier, it would be the ninth best game of the last ten years. Since, in those innocent times, we all thought of war as a happy, cheery experience full of sunshine and unicorns.

But in the months to come, the game’s streamlined, turn-based battles—the perfect gateway drug for the tactically curious—provided a kind of Zen escape, allowing players to control the simple, ordered machinations of military units from a safe, Ender-like distance.

This paragraph contains:
• A drug metaphor
• A homosexuality metaphor
• A badly-placed, uninformed reference to Zen Buddhism
• A reference to Ender’s Game
• The implication that most video games are controlled from a point so close to the action that you could actually get hurt

You didn’t just play, you were consumed—compelled to conquer every challenge, earn every S-rank, unlock every extra map.

Translation: In Soviet Russia, entertainment consumes you!

Advance Wars may be a naïve bit of paramilitary escapism,

A fact which somehow makes it stand out among video games.

When it comes to digesting the real horrors of war, that’s just how we Americans roll.

Fuck the heck? Dude. Seriously. I don’t care what Lt. Col. Grossman says, you have not experienced anything resembling the "real horrors of war" just because you played fucking Advance Wars.

10. Left 4 Dead (Valve, 2008)

Fun fact: Left 4 Dead 2 came out a few weeks ago. It took slightly longer than one year for the sequel to be made. That’s how much content Left 4 Dead games have.

After years of educational and "serious" games claiming they teach social values or life lessons, Left 4 Dead has finally done it.

Left 4 Dead, for those of you who don’t know, is a game about shooting zombies in the face and running away and eventually dying no matter what you do. According to the A.V. Club, these are life lessons that thank god our children are finally learning.

Total strangers on the Internet learn to work together, share their knowledge, and even give up their health packs, because the game’s demands are so clear: Work with your teammates, or you’ll die.

Hey, A.V. Club? Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Tribes, Tribes 2, Unreal Tournament, Splinter Cell, and nearly every other game made in the last ten years are on lines 1-inifity for you. They want to talk to you about maybe playing some video games before you write your article about video games.

Incidentally: don’t capitalise after a colon. Are you sure you’re professional writers?

Good aim helps, but not as much as patience and attentiveness.

For fuck’s sake. That was the case in Wolfenstein 3D. That is the case in every shooter ever.

The seemingly random onslaughts dictated by the AI keep players constantly on edge, and while each campaign has a thin framework, their stories never get in the way of the one you create on the fly.

Translation: there is no story.

Lifelong friendships are tested by the final scene, as you witness which of your friends will come back to free you from a mob and haul you to safety—and which ones turn tail and run.

Anybody whose lifelong friendships can be tested by a video game needs to fucking relax. Maybe take some Xanax.

9. Final Fantasy XII (Square Enix, 2006)

FYI: Final Fantasy XII is not the best Final Fantasy game to come out in the last ten years.

It would have been enough had Final Fantasy XII eliminated random encounters. The tedious cycle of "walk three steps, fight a battle, return to step one" had dominated console role-playing games for an unacceptably long time, so Final Fantasy XII ditched it, then went further. Borrowing the best ideas from the MMO sphere, the game not only brought the bad guys out in the open where you could see (and avoid) them, it also cut way back on tedious menu navigation with the Gambit system, freeing players to make larger strategic decisions.

Hey, A.V. Club, have you ever played a video game before? I’m serious. Have you? Final Fantasy XII was so far from being the first game to have mobs you can see before entering combat with them it’s not even funny. I mean, I literally can’t say what the first game that had that was, but I know that Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals on the SNES (published in North America fully ten years before FF12) had a whole suite of mechanics involving manipulating the movement and actions of the monsters to get through tricky situations. Final Fantasy XII doesn’t do that. It just has… monsters you can see outside of combat. As did one other vastly superior JRPG released the very same year that I can think of off the top of my head.

Also: the gambit system? Dragon Warrior IV on the NES — street date October 1992 — had that. Only it was better in Dragon Warrior IV, since you didn’t have to fucking collect the strategic choices before you could use them, like you do in FF12. And you didn’t have to do half as much micromanagement, so you could make those "larger strategic choices" instead of spending hours fucking around in the menus.

By removing the separation between exploration and combat, Final Fantasy XII created a seamless world whose various locales rewarded repeat visits.

Translation: there’s lots of grinding.

Vibrant art direction and a straightforward story about the temptations of power complemented the huge improvements to battle

"Straightforward" is a kind way of describing the story in FF12. I’d have gone with "bog-standard." And this is probably the only Final Fantasy game ever made where I will not agree with your comment about vibrant art direction — Final Fantasy 12 is the brownest game I have ever played in my life. The graphics are technically very sound, but everything is brown and drab and desperately boring to look at. Here is a screenshot. Here’s another. And another. I didn’t cherry-pick these: they all came from the first page of Google image search results for "Final Fantasy 12." I took the first three that weren’t like box art or shots of the sky, which, thankfully, isn’t brown.

As I said to Stephen: Counter-Strike was a realistic, gritty anti-terrorist game set in the desert. It was less brown than Final Fantasy 12.

making Final Fantasy XII the most enjoyable Japanese RPG since Chrono Trigger.

This is my favourite line in the whole article. No, not just because it’s wrong. Not just because it’s not even the most enjoyable Final Fantasy game since Chrono Trigger. Not even just because there was another JRPG released just one month earlier that was infinitely superior. It’s my favourite line because of a fact about Chrono Trigger.

In Chrono Trigger, you could see the mobs on the map before combat.

8. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Rockstar Games, 2002)

Decent choice. If you’re going to pick a Grand Theft Auto game, this is probably the right one.

The Grand Theft Auto series is known for masking clever satires of American culture with gleeful violence

Is that what it’s known for? I thought it was known for being a free-world game where you could kill police and run people over.

Mafioso in Hawaiian shirts, polyester-clad cocaine lords, and petty moguls form the cast of caricatures the series does so well, populating a world where the excesses of its crime-spree gameplay feel appropriate.

Mafioso is singular. You’re looking for either mafiosos or mafiosi. Don’t use foreign languages if you don’t understand how.

Also, isn’t it a game about crime? Be a bit weird if crime seemed inappropriate. Not sure you should hold it up as a stunning triumph in that way. That’s like praising Super Monkey Ball for creating a world where monkeys rolling around in balls feels appropriate.

GTA’s intelligence is often lost in the hullabaloo over its violence, but Vice City simply asks players to be as absurd as the characters around them, creating a plausible, neon-soaked fiction that’s as funny as it is canny. Rockstar burdened San Andreas with too many disparate activities and rendered GTA IV with inappropriate gravitas, making Vice City the best whole-package showcase of the series’ brilliance.

This is probably the best section of this entire article from a non-drivel perspective. It’s still stuffed with pretentious bullshit words, and i’d like them maybe to mention the gameplay for a change instead of raving about "plausible fiction," but it’s basically okay.

7. Ico (Sony, 2001)

Translation: This game is way popular among the kind of internet geeks who read about video games on A.V. Club, so let’s pander! I’m going to quote this blurb in its entirety:

Ico is a clever-enough hybrid of action game and brain-teaser, but its story of a nameless horned boy rescuing Yorda, a spectral girl, captured gamers’ imaginations with its subtlety. In a world of lonesome cathedrals and threatening shadows, the two must cross a language barrier to cooperate, expressing ideas on platonic love and universal language by poignantly—and now iconically—holding hands. It was an introduction to the minimalist directorial vision of Fumito Ueda; cemented in the later Shadow Of The Colossus and in 2010’s highly anticipated The Last Guardian, his worlds are rich with the suggestion of narrative, but they leave players to fill in the blanks. With Ico, Ueda became one of the earliest designers to introduce the idea that games can be art, and the title must be considered an essential milestone in the medium’s emotional maturation.

Fuck the heck? I’ll go ahead and say that this paragraph is the Ninja Gaiden of game reviews — it is the quintessential example of style over substance. That paragraph says absolutely nothing, but it uses the entire GDP of Mali in ten-cent words to do it.

Also: "cemented in the later Shadow Of The Colossus and in 2010’s highly anticipated The Last Guardian, his worlds are rich with the suggestion of narrative, but they leave players to fill in the blanks " is not an independent clause, unless the "worlds" were "cemented," which makes no sense. That entire sentence is literally nonsense. It cannot be parsed. And also it refers to a game that doesn’t come out until next year in the past-tense and claims knowledge of it. Are you guys really sure you’re professional writers?

6. World Of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004)
Blizzard has faced plenty of competition since it all but conquered the MMORPG market with World Of Warcraft.

If there’s been plenty of competition, I’m not 100% sure it’s accurate to say that Blizzard conquered the market. Just FYI.

Anyhow, this entry is mostly fine. I’m skipping it.

5. Portal (Valve, 2007)
The legend of Portal starts with a fledgling team of still-in-school gamemakers who pitched a concept to Valve’s Gabe Newell, walked away with a deal, and eventually delivered a masterpiece.

The legend of Portal — handed down on papyrus preserved in a hidden cave since the long-ago days of 2007! That’s not a 100% accurate retelling of the legend, either. But we’ll let that slide.

Their brilliant portal mechanic and the extensive playtesting that perfected the puzzles made this an excellent game.

The game development process according to the A.V. Club:

1) Have brilliant idea
2) Playtest
3) Receive your internet award for making the fifth-best game of the last ten years

But credit also goes to Valve for what they brought to the table

Such as: making the game, distributing the game, financing the game, and also I think they did the playtesting too.

a writing team that stitched the levels together with hilarious but meaningful dialogue; one of the decade’s best villains, the complex, conflicted GLaDOS; the subtle integration into the wider Half-Life universe; and the fact that GLaDOS not only eludes you at the end, but comes back and sings you a farewell, penned by geek troubadour Jonathan Coulton.

That’s pretty badly written, and nobody had ever heard of Jonathan Coulton before Portal.

Who thinks of something like that? Valve, that’s who.

Damn right, sucka! Nobody ever had the brilliant idea of making a funny game before. Only Valve thought of that!

That or you’re wrong about your brilliant idea — playtesting — awards methodology, and it has more to do with nobody else getting it right before.

4. Rock Band (MTV Games/Electronic Arts, 2007)
The four-player experience accommodates precise, determined players and drunken fools all in the same session. What other party game can satisfy all of the people all of the time?

Mario Kart? Also Smash Bros. And Super Monkey Ball. And, actually, pretty much all of them. Have you ever played a party game before?

It was made by musicians for everyone; its devotion to music is evident in song selections that skirt the mainstream and animations that replicate onstage performance as lovingly as Madden seeks to mirror football.

Rock Band is the fourth-best game of the last ten years because the animations of bands on stage look like bands on stage. And also because the producers couldn’t get the rights to anything good, so made a whole collection of B-sides and insignificant acts instead of popular songs like those other hacks did.

Where prior music games were limited by static disc-based releases, a constant supply of optional downloadable content makes Rock Band the only music game that persistently thinks beyond the boundaries of physical releases.

Except for Guitar Hero III, which came out before Rock Band. But that’s fine.

3. Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks, 2008)
Some games have great storylines; some have great worlds.

And some games have gameplay, but you wouldn’t know it from this article.

Bethesda Softworks’ update of the Fallout series is a world-building triumph.

Fallout 3 is not a world-building game, but you wouldn’t know it from this article.

Fallout 3’s crowning achievement is structuring the Wasteland as a framework in which players can pick and choose how they’ll combine those ingredients to tell their own story.

If you try to combine the ingredients from Resident Evil 5 to tell your own story, Capcom will send people to your house to punch you in the face. True story.

Is the Wasteland the basis for a traditional Western, a cautionary Mad Max tale, or a balls-out action saga? It can be all of the above, and much more.

Those three things are, after all, not at all the same.

The measure of a game should never be a bottom-line summation of playable time, but the fact that Fallout 3 offers easily a hundred hours of post-apocalyptic storytelling can’t be overlooked.

What if I am — by your own admission above — providing all the storytelling myself? Can’t literally any game do that? I can play Kool-Aid Man on the 2600 for a hundred hours and make up all kinds of stories. Does it get credit for that? how about if you’re going to play the length card we focus on how many hours of gameplay it has?

2. Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004)

Outrageous, complete goofball choice at #2? Check.

Indie games existed long before 2004, but there’s a good argument for pegging Katamari Damacy as the catalyst that helped usher in the new wave of low-fi, handmade games.

Sounds good, right? Next line:

Of course, Keita Takahashi’s quirky game wasn’t independently made.

Seriously, A.V. Club. What the hell are you talking about?

Incidentally, for those people who are interested in correct things: that catalyst that ushered in the new wave of indie games was low-cost downloadable game services. It was Steam, and Xbox Live Arcade, and WiiWare, and there’s probably something on the Playstation 3 also but nobody owns one so who cares. Having the ability to distribute your game to a wide audience without massive upfront costs? Being able to make money from it without some dodgy shopping cart software you need to maintain yourself? That’s the catalyst, dumbshits. Not Katamari Damacy.

He tricked his bosses at Japanese publisher Namco into letting him make an oddball game about rolling all the detritus of consumer culture into a huge ball, then launching it into space.

He didn’t trick anybody into shit. Namco is arguably most famous for making quirky, oddball games. I’m serious. Here’s the list of Namco games. They made a whole lot of the most well-known oddball games of all time, very much including Dig Dug and Pac-Man, which you may have heard of. And also an RPG about the life and works of Chopin. Katamari Damacy is like par for the Namco course, screwball.

And in doing so, he cemented all the themes that would define the independent spirit of gaming: a quirky tone, experimental mechanics, twee art, and cooler-than-thou music.

Ken’s Labyrinth came out in 1993, and was an independent game with all of those themes. Just a heads-up.

1. BioShock (2K Games, 2007)

Bioshock is like the seventh-best game on this list. But go ahead.

A three-word pleasantry—"Would you kindly?"—set up the most stunning plot twist in gaming history and made BioShock a lasting icon.

You were stunned by Bioshock’s plot twist? It was broadcast, like, hours in advance. You really didn’t see it coming? Hey, here’s a suggestion: be maybe a little bit less drunk when you play video games. I, as somebody who played Bioshock while, like, awake, wasn’t even slightly shocked by it. You know what game had a better plot twist than Bioshock? I’ll give you a hint: it came out a month before Final Fantasy XII and was a much, much better JRPG.

Also Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. And that’s a goddamn Professor Layton game.

Many games have stolen its moral-choice device—witness the recent glut of "Press A to kill, B to rescue" situations—but the copycats miss the real insight of the "Would you kindly?" moment, which showed players that the notion of choice in a game is just an illusion anyway.

Not killing people? Bioshock invented that? Neverwinter Nights came out in 2002, and it had a fully-developed alignment system that impacted a lot of stuff throughout the course of the game, whereas Bioshock had one repeated binary choice that determined in aggregate which of two endings you would receive.

Also: Bioshock demonstrated that choice in video games is an illusion much more compellingly through its shitheaded insistence on making important moments play out in cinematics.

It’s all in how you execute the illusion, and BioShock uses every tool of the medium to tell its story of extreme libertarianism gone awry:

Bioshock tells its story of extreme libertarianism gone awry by establishing a totalitarian police state and then having the central government get paranoid. That’s a tool of the medium, I guess.

richly characterized dialogue, the gloom of a crumbling Atlantis, the limitations of the first-person viewpoint.

That really probably is every tool of the medium these idiots at A.V. Club are aware of. They don’t seem to know what gameplay is.

Other tools used by Bioshock to tell its story:
• Non-interactive cutscenes
• Non-interactive radio chatter
• Non-interactive recorded diaries
• Pipe Dream

It was a visionary effort, one that set the bar high for games that would follow—especially the upcoming BioShock 2.

If you’re talking about atmosphere: yes. If you’re talking about gameplay: well, Bioshock had like four different types of mobs, all of which could be trivially killed en masse without ever firing a round or using a magic power. And it had a whole lot of Pipe Dream.

So, now that we’re done with the list, let’s take a look at some fun facts!

• Advance Wars
• Final Fantasy 12
• World of Warcraft

Think for a minute: what do these three games have in common?

Give up? They are the only games on this list — of fifteen! — that are not Xbox games.

Seven people wrote this list. Now, just as a thought experiment, let’s set aside World of Warcraft — its prominence in culture pretty much guarantees it a spot on any list like this. So we have seven writers, fourteen games, two of them non-Xbox. Fourteen divided by seven is two, right? So if they picked two games apiece, it starts to look like six of their seven writers only ever gamed on the Xbox.

This is a possible explanation for the absense of several high-profile titles that never received Xbox releases. Also for the absense of several games that were available on the Xbox in inferior versions.

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November 24th, 2009 Posted by Darien | Games | 12 comments