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The New Gamer 2004 Gaming Retrospective

January 25, 2005 By Glenn Turner

In the second annual The New Gamer Yearly Retrospective, we take a look at our staff's most memorable gaming experiences - best and worst, most unpleasent and disappointing. Join us as we assemble our 2004 gaming memoirs.
Front Mission 4 - zee wanzer iz en zee hangzar

What surprised you most about games/gaming industry this year:

R. LeFeuvre:

I find games today too nice. I don't mean that they are easier to beat in general, but that when you lose they let you down so easy. "Aw shucks man, you kinda died back there. Chin up! You are still a worthwhile gamer, please try again". So imagine my delight when, after coming back with what I considered a pretty large sized Katamari, the King of the Cosmos shut me down. Hard. I thought I had played pretty good, but like the King says, "Like that's possible". So when I finally got my Katamari so large that the King himself was impressed, well, my pride as a gamer swelled to dangerous levels. There needs to be a badge or a shirt that I can where to tell the world that I earned the King's respect. (Oh yeah, I'd wear it.)

D. Riley:

Front Mission 4 didn't blow me quite as far out of the water as I would've imagined, but any game with giant fighting robots will be hard pressed not to entice me even just a little. No exception was found here! Despite plots stolen directly from George Clooney movies and ridiculous South American accents, there is no current giant robot combat game like Front Mission 4. My roommate would stare at me while I would spend literally multiple HOURS configuring my robots to drop off even a single pound of weight. This is me, the person who sometimes won't make Ramen when he hasn't eaten all day because it "takes too long". The new link system and the ensuing orgies of violence when, as George Peppard used to say, "a plan came together" only sweetened the deal. The real pleasure in Front Mission 4 was to be found in the hanger.

G. Turner:

Copious amounts of whiskey doused properly with coke, Burnout 3, Juno Reactor's Pistolero booming through my speakers as the sun peeks over a barricade of apartments blocking my view of the Chicago skyline as I score my umpteenth takedown for the night. Burnout 3 is not the equivalent of a gaming orgasm, no: it's a gaming orgasmotron.

Worms 3D - how sad and cold it is.

What was your most unpleasant gaming memory?

R. LeFeuvre:

Tales of Symphonia. Somewhere after ChronoTrigger I lost the ability to enjoy RPGs. I had hoped that with Tales of Symphonia's hyped multiplayer combat engine and it's hypothesized decent story that I could once again enjoy one. But it was certainly not the case and my poor adventuring group is still waiting for me to get them out of Disk 1. Not likely.

D. Riley:

Blood Will Tell, nee Dororo, immediately caught my eye when I saw its preview received effusive praise in a gaming mag. Normally I'm not such an easy prey for misleading crap, but this is a game whose primary character is a wooden robot samurai. No complaints here! Well, at least until the game was actually played. Blood Will Tell angered me not because it was bad, but because it reached a previously unsurpassed level of mediocrity. The game was so unrelenting in its boredom that it actually offended me. As my gaming track record attests, certain venues make it painfully easy to please me. If you dropped a rancid steak in front of a dog he'd probably eat it. Well... I did this time too. But for next time I've learned my lesson! ...maybe...

G. Turner:

Worms 3D (hey, it wasn't released stateside until 2004). Attercob and I used to spend hours playing Worms 2 multiplayer - just the demo, as we were poor boys back then. I had high hopes for Worms 3D, expected to be disappointed and wound up with garbage. Some notes scrawled down from my July session with it include "WOEFULLY INADEQUATE CAMERA" and a hastily scribbled "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING??" Heap on loads of bugs, poor level design choices and amazingly low frame rates in first person mode and you have a game that is practically unplayable. Brilliant in 2D and apparently trash in 3D, I wish Worms would have neglected the third dimension just a bit longer.

Half-Life 2 - how sad and cold it is. In a good way, not in a Worms 3D way.

What surprised you most about games/gaming industry this year?

R. LeFeuvre:

I can't believe it, but somehow this years biggest gimmicks were both amazingly fun. It started with the EyeToy (which I didn't get until the beginning of the year), which became the game of choice in the hotel room I stayed in during E3 (without the aid of liquor). Then Nintendo's "Connectivity" somehow delivered some of the best multiplayer gaming I've ever been a part of, with a three part combo of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, Legend of Zelda: Four Swords and Pacman Vs. (the latter being the best and the cheapest).

D. Riley:

It's not that I hate PCs, please don't think of me like that but I once heard a rumor that playing PC games gives you "the gay" and it absolutely horrified me. There's that and I also enjoy sitting in a comfy couch when I play a game, not a wooden chair. Plus, everyone knows that PCs are for Notepad and poorly ripped mp3s of Japanese 80s synth-pop. Thus, it was only by complete accident that I managed to play through Half-Life 2 while a friend was temporarily living in my apartment. I was shocked. I played through Half-Life many a time in my heyday, when my computer was only behind the times, not BEHIND the times. I loved that game, but Half-Life 2 blew my socks off. Encouraging enemy design, interesting (though scant) weapons and the ability to render six bad guys on the screen without causing your computer to explode. These things were all excellent. Sharing almost nothing in common with Doom 3? Just icing on the cake. Maybe I'll slap on my leather chaps and play some more PC games yet.

G. Turner:

Other than the severe reaction to EA Spouse, there wasn't much that took me off-guard this year. However, one game did slap me upside the face and left me stunned: Metal Gear Solid 3. All that I mocked of Snake Eater since its 2003 E3 showing was thrown right back in my face: the food and cure system was worked into the game with a minimal, but important burden and the game took on a more playful, less self-important tone. Well, at least for the first two-thirds of the tale. While the final third of the game suffers from the same weaknesses of the prior games (namely, a love of hearing its own voice, and unstoppable bosses that elicit a familiar, exasperated 'You've got to be kidding me' sigh), the rest of the game is well worth the price of admission. It is, in fact, so strong that if Kojima has simply rolled the credits after the first pen-ultimate battle this surely would have been my favorite game of the year.

Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes - Where it's always Bullet Time.

What was your most disappointing gaming moment?

R. LeFeuvre:

Finding out that my 47 hour, 42 minute, 100% complete save for Burnout 3 (on the Xbox) was untransferable. Bonus disappointment: it's by design. My only Xbox game, my only Xbox game, can't be taken to my would-be-new system... What a warm welcome.

D. Riley:

Remakes certainly seemed to be in vogue this season, and Metal Gear Solid was not safe from the trend. Despite the restriction that the new iteration of the series only had TWO titles, Konami decided they could squeeze a remake out of their asses. The superlative Resident Evil "REmake" emboldened me, as did the fact that my much loved wunderkind of Japanese cinema, Ryuhei Kitamura, was directing the cutscenes while Silicon Knights, of Blood Omen fame, would be on hand for the game itself. Unbelievable! Wading through this quagmire, however, all we really learned was that the addition of MGS2 gameplay mechanics into MGS1 (first person shooting) makes the game so pathetically easy it's barely worth playing, and the over-hyped and over-excessive cutscenes don't help the matter. Regardless of the upped graphics, nothing about the game had particularly changed, and if you closed your eyes you felt like you were playing the same Metal Gear Solid only on easy mode. The only thing that could've made it worse would be if Hideo Kojima injected more of his hippie Greenpeace crap into it. I need to stop playing these games.

G. Turner:

Call me indecisive, but I have two:

Fable. Now, don't go calling me one of those folks that was pumping it up since it was announced. Oh no. Since word trickled down that multiplayer had been axed and morality was more 'flexible' than originally scribed, I had been lowering my hopes to below-sea-water levels. And sadly, I was very disappointed to find out on September 14th that the game contained interaction that was barely above what we saw in Abe's Oddysey, combat that was simultaneously overly-complex and too simplistic, and a game that was heralded as being the antithesis to linearity turned out to be straight as an arrow. Some may say that Fable is an excellent action/adventure game and I say 'No, Devil May Cry was an excellent action/adventure game - this is a lackluster pile. And if you call me chicken-chaser one more frickin' time, I'm going to be using your head as a trophy.' Quite frankly, I think Fable's champions are those that lean towards the malevolent section of society, as if you're playing 'white side' the game is very, very, very dull. Very. The only reason it is sharing the title of most disappointing gaming moment is because I never properly finished the game. Sorry Big Blue Box, but you lost me around 'The Arena'.

Now, the second disappointment: Silent Hill 4. Despite how the game affected my perception of ceiling fans, and regardless of how brilliant I found the first half, the game on its own (as well as part of the Silent Hill franchise), is a nothing but a severe letdown. In fact, the solid first half only dooms it further - it had so much potential in its ambiguities, in its potential psychoses and claustrophobia. It's a fantastic concept - an ever-branching purgatory from a single room, but unfortunately it's botched by the most wretched level-reuse, dull as dishwater combat and two-steps-back inventory management. On paper, I'm sure it looked structurally brilliant and I'm appreciative of the episodic management of acts, but this should have baked a bit longer in the conceptual oven.

Check your local discount bins!

What did you feel was most depressing gaming trend this year?

R. LeFeuvre:

Sequels. There were just too many damn sequels. I eventually began tracking down and playing games that were "new to me" in order to get something fresh. I enjoyed Cubivore (GCN, 2002), Seaman (DC, 2000), ChuChu Rocket (GBA, 2001), Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color (PS2, 2003), Ikaruga (GCN, 2003) and Rez (PS2, 2002) each for the first time this year.

D. Riley:

Sequel-itis that doesn't conform to my gaming ideals. We can have Crash Bandicoot Racing 6.7 or Mega Man X^10(squared) but something like Parasite Eve 3 or Zone of the Enders 3 is nowhere on the horizon? What kind of god would allow that when the gaming industry is putting out sequels to franchises that were ruined with the LAST game (Devil May Cry 3)? I swear to god if Lara Croft gets another game and Aya Brea doesn't I'm gonna flip out and stab someone in the checkout aisle for no reason.

Except... for the "no sequels" reason. No other reason than that!

G. Turner:

Flatulence. When will major games cease using 'farting' as a gameplay device? Why did it ever become one in the first place? I could write off its use in Under the Skin, but Fable? Shame on you.

CAN YOU FIND NO BETTER GARMENTS FOR YOUR KING? YOU ALWAYS DISAPPOINT.

What game, or gaming moment did you regret missing out on this year?

R. LeFeuvre:

I totally missed out on Monster Hunter. I've mentioned in the past that it was my biggest surprise at E3, and I had actually talked several friends into getting the game with me. Then we all just kind of forgot about it. Oh well, I heard the online stuff was terrible so, maybe I'm more fortunate to have the short but awesome memories of the game I played at E3 than to have it spoiled by reality.

D. Riley:

Katamari Damacy is a beautiful thing, like a child that needs to be nurtured and protected in one of those glass boxes that helps them breathe. When I first put the game in, dancing pandas greeted me followed by the king of space's enormous package - seriously, the thing is like an elephant trunk. You know, if the elephant trunk was in SPACE - and then the gameplay wowed me with its serene non-competitiveness. Hindered only by the time limit on each stage, I experienced a curious feeling of Zen as my little prince rolled his giant ball. Attribute it to poor fate, circumstances dictated that I was only really able to appreciate the game with six or more pints of Yuengling in me. This Pennsylvania beer demands a curious balance, I'll tell you, and it's rare that I've imbibed enough to fuel my Katamari Damacy desire without having also imbibed enough to kill a dead horse. Katamari Damacy, will I ever complete you? Only if I learn how to stop passing out with my shoes on.

G. Turner:

Xbox Live. Unlike last year, I had at least one darn good reason to get with the XBL program: Burnout 3. But I just couldn't muster up my wallet to shell out $50 for a headset. Sure, I had my 'two months free!' coupon but what fun is that if I can't hear my friend's defeated moans? Also, perhaps if I had Xbox Live I would have spent more than half an hour playing Halo 2.

Runners-up: Gradius V and R-Type: Final. The latter of which I actually purchased but it sits on my shelf, collecting dust. Why? I don't know.

Grandpa? Grandpa?

What gaming moment will you remember years from now?

R. LeFeuvre:

On September 10th at 11pm PST, Wanda and the Colossus (or NICO, for the people that had been reading about it since they chilled on the beach with Yorda) was officially announced. Finally, after at least two years of rumors, leaked photos and a week of watching a Flash counter tick down, the game was real. I was so psyched for the news that I ditched class early to ensure I could get on the right train home and see the news as it happened. Of course the news was all in Japanese, but that didn't stop Mr. Turner and I from piecing together a theory. In the end, we turned out to be mostly correct (plus we were totally first with the news).

D. Riley:

G. Turner:

The battle with Metal Gear Solid 3's THE END. I've fought arduous and lengthy boss battles many times, but nothing compares to THE END and the one and a half-hours I spent in my final attempt to take him down. Possibly one of the most satisfying, and mediative, gaming experiences you will encounter.

Lifeline - smartly dressed for success.

What is your hope for the future of gaming, be it next year or years from now?

R. LeFeuvre:

I hope that by the time I'm working in the game industry, most developers will be scheduling projects to function in a 40 hour week. Wait... I should pick something that is actually possible. I hope that by the time I'm working in the game industry that most developers will be scheduling projects to function in a 60 hour week. And provide unlimited Jones Rootbeer.

D. Riley:

The idea that someone could make a voice-controlled game is laughable, but Lifeline accomplished it with enough panache to ALMOST make it a good game. It was like this close (imagine my fingers just an inch apart). And they did it with a main character that wore pants! That's commitment! As irritating as the game could it be, with its frequent misinterpretations of "check the dresser" as "use one of my only THREE healing capsules, whore of Bablyon", Lifeline could surprise you with how emotionally real and deep its main character could be. Simply ponder to Rio "I wonder if Naomi is still alive" and Kristen Miller, Rio's actress, will let loose with an encouraging speech about your girlfriend that sounds so remarkably human it's hard not to be endeared by it. If there's a Lifeline 2 I'll play it unconditionally, on the condition that Rio still wears pants.

Gotta have scruples.

G. Turner:

Sadly, two of my hopes are ones leftover from last year: The intentionally off-kilter Killer7 and the perpetually delayed Psychonauts. Additional hopes from last year were squelched, like the Western disappearance of Giftpia, and we now see that Feel the Magic isn't quite so magical. But I'm supposed to be speaking of the future! Destroy All Humans looks deliciously nihilistic, but otherwise I think I'll more impressive with facets of upcoming games, rather than the games themselves (such as stunning facial and body animations as showcased by this year's Half-Life 2). Oh yeah, Okami looks bitchin'.

And that is it for 2004! We wish it all the best as it fades into obscurity, living on only in future editions of Trivial Pursuit: The Naughts. Now, let's stop living in the past and embrace 2005 with open arms & sore thumbs.

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#1 Jimmy Jamz Jan 25, 2005 03:43pm

Quote:
As irritating as the game could it be, with its frequent misinterpretations of "check the dresser" as "use one of my only THREE healing capsules, whore of Bablyon"...

That caused a wayward secretion in my pants. I have been saying this for over a year now, I think I need a PS2 and a bunch of old, cheap games that I missed out on.

Props to the three of you for brightening an afternoon home sick.

#2 D. Riley Jan 25, 2005 06:08pm

Thanks for the kind words! I feel like I wasn't at my most funny, which was what I aim for in these things, instead of Mr. Turner's starch shirted capitalism (YOU BASTARD DIE). YOUR words brightened MY day!

Hope you feel better!

#3 Dublyner Jan 25, 2005 07:39pm

D. Riley wrote:
I feel like I wasn't at my most funny, which was what I aim for in these things

Not true, I laughed out loud not once but thrice while reading your responses, almost spitting my drink when I caught a glimpse of Pika64.

I definitely agree with Pec on his last comment about design innovation; as a PC gamer, I'm looking forward to new games powered by the HL2 and Doom3 engines, both a full generation ahead of console technology, and the upcoming Unreal 3 engine, which is several generations ahead of a wet dream.

Now, if only we could convince some developers to use that powerful medium to make games actually worth playing, well...

Oh, and while it's true that PC gaming gives you a pretty heavy case of the gay, there are a few games coming up that I'm really excited about: continuation of the Blue Shift and Opposing Force elements of the HL Saga, and F.E.A.R., which as far as I can tell is a potentially fun merging of military squad strategy and survival horror.

#4 Dark Schneider Jan 28, 2005 03:34pm

I want that shirt too.

#5 Namons Jan 31, 2005 06:35am

I wonder if Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone have heard of F.E.A.R. yet, seeing as its an acronym from one of their Fighting Fantasy books from back in the day. Don't believe me? Just go to any fan site on the subject. :P Or ask me and i'll post a webcam pic of my personal copy of the book in question. Perhaps they didn't nail down the copyright for the acronym. *shrugs*

#6 Stilgar Jan 31, 2005 12:01pm

F.E.A.R and S.H.E.I.L.D? I think there might be a connection.

#7 Dark Schneider Jan 31, 2005 06:19pm

Namons wrote:
I wonder if Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone have heard of F.E.A.R. yet, seeing as its an acronym from one of their Fighting Fantasy books from back in the day. Don't believe me? Just go to any fan site on the subject. :P Or ask me and i'll post a webcam pic of my personal copy of the book in question. Perhaps they didn't nail down the copyright for the acronym. *shrugs*

Nerd! Nerd!

I got to playtest Steve Jackson's game Strange Synergy with him once.