Lucidity was a quiet blast and adding its visual and aural beauty to a humble storyline made the game one of my most leisurely pleasant gaming experiences in years. Machinarium on the other hand was a tour de force reinvention of the point-and-click adventure game and easily the most endearing of the genre I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience (even moreso than previous genre favourite, Grim Fandango. The game was visually spectacular and may be the best-looking game I’ve ever played. I was able to play the entire way through with my wife and besides Rock Band and Guitar Hero, it may be the first gaming experience that she’s actively looked forward to (“Can we play with Mr. Robot Friend again tonight?”).

Dragon Age has largely been a disappointment to me. Perhaps it was hyped too much. Perhaps my standards for the genre are just too high. In any case, while it takes gameplay concepts from several different games and kluges them together into what could have been the perfect game, it doesn’t improve on the ideas it takes. In fact, it doesn’t even do things as well as the games it borrows from.

The control scheme (from movement to hot bar) comes from WoW, but it’s a clunkier version of that. The moral paths and ability to change fairly significantly the outcome of events hails from a number of places, but doesn’t come near the fluidity of something like The Witcher. The talent trees are adequate but don’t match the versatility of those honed over the years by Blizzard. The lore and storytelling are there, but again don’t hold up to the stuff Blizzard routinely puts out. The tactics system for controlling the party without having to micromanage comes from Final Fantasy‘s gambit system, but doesn’t work half as well so that you end up micromanaging half the time anyway. The one thing it does better than anything I’ve seen is voice-acting for the dialogue (though I’m sad that your own character doesn’t say her own lines—after I went to all the trouble to chose a voice for her), and yet, I’ll make dialogue choices that I think sound one way and yet characters interpret them 100% differently than I thought—so there’s definitely room for improvement.

This is not to say that Dragon Age is a bad game. It’s not. It’s just so much less than it could have been. The graphics are weak and while playing I always felt claustrophobia creeping in. You’re as limited in where you can go as you would be in most JRPGs and seeing as how we’re standing six years after WoW, that’s just a shame. It’d make sense if there was a story-reason for it, but there just isn’t. Dragon Age is set up as a single-player WoW experience and it stumbles in almost every area. Which is just sad considering how much I wanted a MMO-less version of the WoW experience.

PC games are, in my opinion, better than console games. I have personally found them to be much more focused on solid gameplay and less on flashy graphics. Over the last several months I have become a starcraft geek. If you want an interesting cultural study, check out starcraft in South Korea. They have a professional league and players who should be in high school making large salaries. I think starcraft is pioneering esports through starcraft. It won’t necessarily be SC in the future, but I think they have proven that games can be a mainstream sport.

Any news on The Last Guardian or Project Trico or whatever it is now called? Its been some time since Shadow of the Colossus came out.

Most games I get for PC end up costing around $20 and with mods and free downloads etc. I can generally get at least a good fifty hours out of each one (sometimes four times that—even last night I was playing through the final levels of Age of Mythology again and I can’t wait to get into Morrowind again for the fourth time).

PC gaming, I think, tends to offer (still to this day) a more robust gaming experience than consoles and because of that, the pricetag feels a lot lighter. Even something like WoW is a fantastic value in terms of dollars per month spent—when I’m playing the game, other games don’t even appear on the radar.

When I got my PS3, I don’t think there was a primary selling point (even though Blu-Ray was a cool bonus). We needed something to play Beatles Rock Band on and we already had compatible instruments from our PS2 and I was looking forward to the next release from Team ICO. I haven’t given PS Network a try simply because the only game we have is Beatles Rock Band.

I got my PS3 because I wanted a blu ray player, or at least that is what I said–deep down I probably wanted a next gen gaming system more.

You may argue with this Seth, but I think console gaming (now that prices have been lowered) holds a slight edge over pc gaming on price (though there is far more free content on pc games, but I don’t get into that stuff anyway).

Rich, just out of curiosity, do you own a PS3?

It’s too bad you all hate PC gaming. I’d be curious how Xbox Live compares to free services like Battlenet (which is much larger than Xbox Live’s user base).

It’s great that Xbox Live works well (aka, as it’s supposed to) but that doesn’t address the concern raised, i.e. that a working Xbox Live shouldn’t cost a dime. Maybe you think that it should cost a dime. Or even $9.95 monthly. But that is not an argument you made.

The PSN has made some strides though, I play FIFA and CoD on there and have overall positive experiences there.

Feminist criticism can be tiring, but I agree with you here, I think video games NEED some feminist criticism!

As for what people are saying about Uncharted 2, some links:

http://insultswordfighting.blogspot.com/2009/12/games-of-decade-uncharted-2-among.html

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/47768

http://www.acidforblood.net/2009/10/uncharted-2-among-thieves.html

Interestingly, a lot of the praise for Uncharted 2′s characters come from the feminist perspective. Really though, of all mediums, I think video games could benefit from a little feminist criticism.

Out of curiosity–what are people saying about Character design in Uncharted 2? I rented it and played through most of the single player campaign. It was a good game no doubt, but to me it feel short of revolutionary.

I think something else interesting is LucasArts move to play off gamer nostalgia. Their rerelease of Monkey Island (with refurbished art and an all-new voice cast) is a fascinating move and their release of the new Monkey Island game in truly episodic fashion is a pretty cool strategy. (If you’re unaware, when you bought the puzzle-based game at release, you only got the first portion of the game/story, with new pieces coming out every couple weeks.) It’s kind of the model explored by MMOs such as WoW, in which later patches deliver new content for free, but in this case, they are essential to the game rather than value-added.

Still, the nostalgia angle interests me. And all the more so as one more indicator of the conservatism of 2009′s gaming industry. Fear of alienating customers through an untried/untested user experience (i.e. innovation!) is driving companies to rely on outright sequels or at least games of spiritual kin to their predecessors. I mean, this has always been the case within the industry, but it seems in 2009 conservatism was the first, last, and best word on the matter.

One exception that comes to mind is Uncharted 2, which seems to be on its way to being a case study in good character design.

Dragon Age sounded like it had potential but that it may just be expansion of ideas already explored by earlier crops of morally ambiguous decision-based games (as well as Bioware’s prior catalog). Modern Warfare 2 never really sounded like news, despite the fact that it became news. Beatles Rock band proves that a more robust experience can mean a more fun experience, but that’s not exactly news and the game wasn’t exactly innovative (and even in some sense withdrew some of the things that made earlier versions fun).

I think a good question is What from 2009 will be talked about in any critical sense in Fall 2010? Anything?

Despite how slight it was, people still talk about Portal. We still hear about Braid, even if only in reference to “Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid.” Fallout 3, Fables, Mass Effect, Bioshock, and The Witcher all get press still for their role in the maturation of choice and story content. GTA IV is still the bogeyman. L4D2 might get press, but that’s really just expression of L4D innovation. WoW will still be the posterboy for social gaming destroying lives—even though Maple Story‘s user base dwarfs Blizzard’s MMO’s own numbers (but WoW is just a 2005 story with legs. Same goes for EVEonline.

To me, it seemed like 2009 was a dead year for gaming. A sabbatical after a well-played and overly busy couple years leading up to 2008.