The year is coming to an end, and the biggest gaming boom in recent memory is in full swing. Saint's Row The Third, Goldeneye Reloaded, Halo Anniversary, Uncharted 3, Skyrim, WWE 12 and Skyward Sword just to name a few. It's a great time to be a gamer and a bad time to be a poor one. During the greatest 3 weeks of the year I started to think of years past, specifically last year and some of the games released that just didn't live up. This is my list of the top 5 most overrated games of 2010.
5. ModNation Racers.
ModNation racers is a PS3 racer in the vein of Mario Kart. In fact, it's exactly like Mario Kart. So much even that you can actually race as all your favorite Mario characters, unlicensed versions of them of course. The gimmick here is that the game allows the player to design their own tracks, racecars and characters and the amount of options for customization is actually very impressive. All the tools are provided to recreate virtually any character, car or racing strip you can imagine. The racing engine is pretty good as well, controls feel tight, the graphics are cartoony, colorful and fun and despite a lackluster career mode, hopping online or on the couch with a pal for a couple races is actually pretty fun. So why is this an overrated game? Well, in the end the only exceptional part of this game is the creation aspect and the gameplay wears thin after a while. It's a beat for beat Mario Kart clone and once you've raced around a few tracks you've pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. None of the created characters or carts handle differently, they feel the same and make no difference on the race whatsoever. Sure you can race as C'Thulu against the Fantastic Four and Burt Reynolds, but once that novelty wears off you're left with a bland racer with little replay value. You can unlock more parts for cars, tracks and carts by playing through career mode, but there's absolutely no point because you can download any character (and believe me, every character in existence has already been created) online so there's no point in making your own.
ModNation Racers seems impressive on the surface, and it's one of the most customizable games in existence, but beyond that candy coating lies the blandest of chocolates. The cheap kind with that white powder stuff on it.
4. Call of Duty: Black Ops
What? How dare I include a Call of Duty game on this list? Surely one of the games in one of the best selling and most critically acclaimed game series of all time can't be bad. Well, it's not bad really, but it's a game that doesn't really need to exist. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a pretty important game in first person shooter history. It wasn't revolutionary really but it's because of that game that a new standard was set for the genre. The online multiplayer was the best ever at the time and the story moved beyond the stagnant setting of WWII and into the present. Combined with the most solid FPS engine to date it made it the benchmark for the most crowded genre in gaming. Then came World at War, a minor setback for the series, plunging the series back in time instead of advancing it even further. It remains a forgotten installment in the series and therefore not much to talk about. Modern Warfare 2 came after, improving upon it's predecessor, removing the annoying respawning enemies that plagued the original Modern Warfare as well as ramping up the action and storytelling and improving the stability and replayability of the multiplayer making it, in my opinion, the best online FPS ever made. Then Black Ops came out in the fall of 2010, breaking records and putting MW2 in the back of everybody's mind but doing nothing to improve the franchise. It brought back the Nazi Zombies mode from World at War which garnered a great response from critics but felt like nothing more than padding. The multiplayer was alright, but didn't feel quite as tight as MW2's, the story mode was pretty "been there, done that" and didn't feel unique or satisfying. There's only so many explosions, tank battles and beach storming a person can take before it seems like old hat.
Black Ops wasn't a bad game at all, but Activision's business plan of putting out another COD game every year and not innovating at all is quickly milking the series and turning some fans off. The fact that each subsequent title breaks the sales record of the previous means that we're bound to get another game next year, and the year after until people start demanding more from their war shooters.
3. Super Meat BoyHailed as the modern day resurgence of the platformer genre, Super Meat Boy came out last year to glowing reviews from gamers hungry for a challenge. However when the challenge is grappling with the sloppiest, most floaty and unresponsive controls in a game that's designed to be frustrating, I'll gladly take Kirby's Epic Yarn instead. Super Meat Boy is basically a slicker, more polished version of
I Wanna Be The Guy or
Kaizo Mario which are all games that are specifically designed to frustrate the player by being unfair, but where's the challenge in that? Challenge should come from a fair and balanced game that requires skill and the cooperation of good controls and physics to complete, but instead we're given a game where your characters runs as if he's always on greased ice, jumps 400 meters in the air and floats like a cotton ball on the moon. The original Super Mario Bros back in 1985 had perfect jumping and running controls and 25 years later few games can get as perfect as that. As far as bringing back the old school platformer, Mega Man 9 came out a year before with amazing retro graphics and excellent controls, but with modern unlockables, achievements and collectables, with a $10 price tag to boot.
Meat Boy isn't that bad, it's fun for a while and the hidden bandages, unlockable characters and secret levels are a great bonus, it just never feels like a genuine challenge or satisfying experience. The art style is very good however and you do get a lot of value for your money, so if you don't mind dying 100 times to one spike trap that is specifically designed to piss you off, go nuts.
2. Pokemon Black and White
Released in Japan in 2010, Pokemon Black and White versions are the latest in a long long line of Pokemon games starting in 1996, and while the series has gotten buffed up with tons of new features and a new coat of semi-gloss every few years, not a whole lot has changed. In this blogger's opinion, Nintendo's portable RPG series hit it's peak in 2004 with Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen and each version after has been somewhat of a disappointment with Black/White being the first that I've never even gotten close to finishing. Maybe I'm getting too old, but the new batch of Pokemon released in this version can't hold a candle to the original 150 and most of them just seem like 5 second creations with little thought whatsoever. There are now pinecone pokemon, disc pokemon, bell pokemon, gear pokemon and numerous redesigns of old ones branded with stupid new names. The main problem with these games is that in 15 years the series hasn't progressed beyond 2d sprite graphics, the same story warmed over year after year, simple sound effects and no voice actors as well as the limitations of always being on handheld consoles.
All that being said, there are now 500 or so Pokemon available in the games now, tons of town to visit, items to find and create and lots of online connectivity that can keep longtime fans busy until the next game, the fact that the series hasn't moved beyond it's billion dollar safe zone, makes this critically praised title just another drop in the Pokemon sea.
1. Heavy Rain
Heavy Rain is not only the most overrated game of 2010, it is one of the worst games I have played on a modern console. Not only did this abysmal piece of electronic garbage get 9s and 10s across the board from reviewers, it appeared on numerous "Best of the Year" lists last year. Critics were wowed by the graphics and innovative storytelling presented in Heavy Rain, and the unique gameplay, and while I will concede that it is a fairly original game in it's execution, at the core of this title is a boring, poorly written, poorly acted and repetitive mess.
Let's start with the story. Heavy Rain is a crime thriller where 4 strangers are caught up in a murder mystery. A private detective hired by one of the victim's mother, a photographer (who really only turns out to be a damsel in distress/eye candy) a distraught father and an FBI agent are all seeking the killer for different reasons and their stories all converge at the end. Unfortunately the story is so convoluted and confusing that the fact that they all meet up at the end isn't important because the way they got there makes no sense. The game is also padded out by subplots and tangents that go nowhere and add nothing to the story because they exist solely to make it seem like the plot is more complex and involved than it really is. Character's frequently make the stupidest choices just to put themselves in peril to make the story exciting, fail to notice obvious clues to what's going on and who the killer is, and occasionally break the laws of space and time in order to hurdle over gaping plot holes. Anyone who says this game has a good storyline really needs to give the game a second look and use a modicum of brain power because I've read Xenogears fanfiction that was better and more coherent than this.
Graphically, the game is decent, I will give it that. The environments are detailed and even though the color scheme is drab and boring, there are a lot of nice textures and modeling. That being said the facial animations are horrible for a game that consists mostly of people talking and spouting off expositional dialogue. I'm all for story based game lay but when the facial animations and lip movements are akin to Speed Racer, it makes it hard to take what's coming out of their mouths seriously. The action scenes are stilted and anything but fluid and any time two characters have to interact with each other it looks like 2 wire mannequins being manipulated by two guys wearing green screen suits.
The gameplay is where this game really hits a wall. The entire game consists of quick time button presses and slowly walking from interactive object to interactive object. The difficulty in the later parts of the game is artificially increased by making the player push more buttons like a crappy game of Simon Says where to pick a lock you have to hold square, triangle, R1 AND turn the analogue stick to the right; Super Meat Boy eat your heart out! The buttons needed to pass certain scenes rarely ever logically corresponds with what you're doing and most of the time it seems completely random. Beating a so-called hard section doesn't feel satisfying, nothing is challenging and the fact that Quantic Dream built a whole game over an overused mechanic that is considered by most to be one of the most annoying trends in modern gaming is baffling. Heavy Rain would be infinitely more fun as a point and click adventure and I had way more fun playing the recent Sam and Max games.
Heavy Rain is a complete failure, and the fact that so many reviewers lost their minds over this game and almost completely ignored other fantastic releases in 2010 like Deadly Premonition and Alan Wake make me wonder where the game industry's head is and how this bodes for the future. Luckily for us though, 2011 is so far a fantastic year for video games and if I do a similar list to this one, it would be much harder.
4:28 PM
Matt
