PC, PS2, and DS: Top games, 2007

TOP 5 NINTENDO DS

- Picross

I used to have about three or four hours of mass transit to contend with per day. That dropped to a more merciful 90 minutes once I started getting a one-way carpool to work, but during those dark days of yore, Picross DS saw me through. Just thinking about this game makes me want to play it again. It’s like… some sort of… visual… sudoku. But not stupid. Plus, when you’re done playing, you’ve drawn pixel-perfect Mario drawing and stuff. Play this if you like your brain.

- Front Mission

I’m pretty much th know who’s championing this game, but boy, it’s a fun one. I haven’t played FM2 or FM5, because it’s not in my crazy Canadian language, but out of the other ones, this is my favourite Front Mission. I played a translated ROM years ago, so I figured there wouldn’t be much for me in this game, but it presents an opportunity to play an alternate storyline with a decent 15 hours in it. If you’re not into really wonk-friendly TBS, or you don’t love giant robots beating the crap out of each other, you might not dig this game. It’s also a touch easy after a certain point.

- Hotel Dusk: Room 215

I almost forgot this came out this year. I’m not a big fan of novelties in video games; my mind wasn’t blown when Psycho Mantis made me switch controller ports, I was mostly annoyed. Now, this game has a few of these kinds of “puzzles;” using the DS in novel, meta ways. I was bothered by that. Te rest of this game, though, is super immersive and interesting. It feels like a really mature title, and not like Gears of War is “mature;” this game actually felt like it was for grownups, not bulbous, overgrown eight-year-olds who like to watch beefy men explode the crap out of each other.

- Glory Days 2

I haven’t really heard much about this gem, but if you haven’t had a crack at it yet, do yourself a favour and pick it up. It’s like a shmup controlled by the stylus, with a Battlefield 1942-style scoring system (capture flags and kill little men for great justice) and a surprisingly weird and sad little storyline (that hardly interrupts gameplay, for those who hate game stories). I can’t believe how little press this game got, and it’s definitely my “underrated game of the year.”

- New York Times Crosswords

I only put this near the last place because it’s barely a DS game as much as it’s a repackaging of newspaper stuff. It is great, though, because I never get a chance to play the New York Times crosswords in real life. This was the only thing to tear my mind away from Picross, and the sheer number of hours of play in this game are probably staggering; there are something like a thousand crosswords in there. And the hard ones can take an hour. That’s at least a few hundred hours. And that’s why people buy games, right?

TOP 3 PS2

- Persona 3

I thought I was done with jRPGs. I loved them as a kid, but as the years have passed, I’ve played less of them, and just had no patience for them. I barely played any jRPGs on the PS2, but this game made me want to check it out anyway, and I was not disappointed. Even after getting my 360, this is why I went back to my PS2. A phenomenal sense of atmosphere is built up through the cut scenes, music, and really clever after-school club alternate life pacing style dealie. It captures a feeling that I’ve never felt in a video game, and I don’t think I can quite explain it. I gave up after about fifteen floors, mostly due to the previously mentioned 360, but I intend to go back once I’ve got a hole in my gaming schedule (which is coming up, given the January/February games drought).

- Odin Sphere

I didn’t get too far with this either, but intend to. It feels virtually nothing like a side-scrolling beat-em-up, but it is. With extra beating up, since you have to go build up your levels by beating up the same guys over and over. But still, this game s so gorgeous and so satisfying that it can’t be ignored.

- GrimGrimoire

Again… didn’t even get that far with it. But I will. What I played, I like, and I appreciate the side-scrolling console RTS concept a bunch. I should really play this more.

TOP 5 ON MY SHITTY PC

- Scrabulous

What can I say? I can’t believe I haven’t been fired yet. Scrabble is good, playing online through Facebook is better.

- Football Manager 2008

This is the only game here that isn’t a web browser game. I’ve played only the last three FMs, but this is my favourite yet. Sure, it’s a really complicated chaos engine mixed with a trillion spreadsheets. Sure, it’s for sports nerds. But if you find me anywhere in video game a more complex number-crunching geekfest, I will give you a kiss. I love this game to bits and will play it consistently until the next iteration is released. Plus, this is the only game where the publisher sent me a free copy (I won it by answering a nerdy question on their podcast).

- Passage

I don’t really want to talk about this game in case people haven’t played it. Thanks to Destructoid for turning me onto it, though. As a game narrative, it really stuck with me for a while and explored things in games that haven’t really been explored before. I should remember to send that guy some money.

- Desktop Tower Defense

Yeah, I played a bunch of this too. This game is fun, and addictive, and awesome, but the thing that really put it over the top for me was being able to compare my high scores to everyone else on my favourite secret message board whose name I definitely won’t tell you even if you ask.

- Peggle

Rounding out my “games you can play on a shitty broken computer with half a brain and a mouse” list is Peggle, which I only even started playing in 2008. Like most Popcap games, it makes my eyes burn. I am not sure why I play it, or why I like it at all. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I hate it. Yet, when I sit at my computer and have twenty minutes to kill while checking my e-mail, I inevitably boot it up and throw some stupid little pachinko balls around. WHY WHY WHY do I play it?! Someone, tell me!

My top five retail 360 games of 2007.

- Mass Effect
I can see the opinion of people who can’t look past this game’s many, many flaws. Weird, irritating loading times,  weird conversation choices, repetitive sidequests… blah blah blah. What I liked about this game was the look of it. Going to dozens of little planets and looking at their sky inspired me so much that all I could think about for months was going to space. Yeah, I’m a giant nerd. Yeah, this game should’ve been in the oven a while longer. But the incredibly immersive universe they created, from the Citadel full of aliens to the awesome red dawrf-scorched skyscapes of backwater planets with a marine outpost plopped somewhere near the middle, drew me in and didn’t let me go until the end. And, actually, the story was pretty good. The last fifth of the game has a couple of plot twists that rival KOTOR in sheer awesometude.

- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
In contrast to Mass Effect, here’s a game that is polished to near-perfection. The single-player game is a stunning piece of videogame storytelling which uses the inevitable lack of control over parts of videogame stories to crushing effect (and I mean that in the good way). It may not be a very long campaign, but it is one that you won’t hate starting over right after you’ve beaten it. It’s that good. The number of really, really memorable moments in the game is massive. And that’s not all, either; the multiplayer, in my opinion, is the most solid multiplayer FPS experience on the console. Forget people’s complaints about the “levelling up” system. You start with everything you need to play well. In fact, I find the more you think like an actual person who actually doesn’t want to die, the better you do. At early levels, I was crushing people because I’d slowly crawl through grass up to snipers and quietly take thme out form behind. The bonuses you get as you level up are more like shiny toys and less like real advantages. This is the only game I play on Xbox Live Arcade anymore.

- The Orange Box
Two first-person shooter titles on my list is kind of crazy, because they’re definitely not my genre, but this is almost definitely their year. Half-Life 2 got a really awesome conclusion. Team Fortress 2 had things that I loved about it (well, mostly just the videos… I find it looks boring in gameplay, and worse, I don’t really enjoy playing it. But, the use of voice in the multiplayer FPS format is just stunning). Then, there’s Portal. I’m not sure if it’s even worth extolling the virtues of this game at this point, because it’s been said much better by pretty much everyone else (I’m looking at you, N’Gai and Totilo) (…he said, as if they were actually reading this). But, if you haven’t played it, it really feels like a monumental step for first-person shooters in spatial innovation, as well as video games in general due to its tone and storytelling. It may be only four hours long at best, but without Portal, I doubt Orange Box would’ve placed in my top five.

- skate.
I’ve only started playing this recently, but I am completely enchanted by it. I realized that I spent upwards of an hour trying to land one specific fliptrick to grind last night. When you do something properly in this game, the sense of satisfaction is awesome. It is excruciatingly difficult at times, but at the same time, always feels kind of hazy and calm, like spending a lazy sunday outside kicking around a real skteboard (I assume… I never had one). The advertisement is a real irritator, and the stick feels a bit random at times, but other than those little niggly issues, this is a game you can sit down with and not stop playing until something forces you away– be it five minutes or five hours later.

- Stranglehold
I won’t pretend this is a game you should own, but I really feel like everyone who loves awesome singleplayer games should give this one a rental. It’s really fun to watch, and even more fun to play. The John Woo attitude just oozes out of the game, and kind of plays out like a really long Woo movie. It also plays out, more importantly, like a perfectly paced action game. It’s never exhausting, and there’s only one point where I found it boring (and that may have been my own fault for not getting where I was supposed to go). It’s difficult at times, but never repetitive. The mini-game mode fits in flawlessly and keeps things fresh. The “tequila bombs” have a suitably dumb videogame name and are each really stupidly fun to use. Play this. Thank me later.

Stay tuned for top five 360 Arcade games, DS games, and top three PS2 and low-end-PC.