Top Ten Overlooked Holiday Games
In case you hadn’t noticed, there aint jack shit coming out right now. The holiday season is over (thank god), and it is now time to catch up. I’m sure we’re all currently in the vicinity of a now fat stack of games that got added to out already out of control backlog, it’s time to truly dig in. This holiday season was the most crowded one I can possibly remember. There must’ve been at least 25 games worth buying, so there has to be some everyone here either really wanted to get to or just forgot about entirely. As someone with a lot of free time and disposable income, I bought a hell of a lot of games this past fall, and here is the top ten overlooked games from this past holiday season.
10. Blitz: The League II
The first Blitz: The League game was a big time guilty pleasure for me. It was a really fun game with a interesting crux in the form of a story mode written by the writer for another guilty pleasure of mine: The short lived ESPN drama Playmakers that was shot down by the No Fun League. The sequel takes everything I liked about the first game a cranked the wackiness up to 11. Any game where you can target testicles for a dirty hit get’s my stamp of approval. The game’s story is so out there and ridiculous that at one point your character gets sent to jail for roiding up and you have to play football to get out a la The Longest Yard. It’s not a phenomenal achievement, but it is quite a bit of fun, and it’s probably going to be real cheap real quick.
9. Alone In The Dark: Inferno
Now I know what you’re thinking. Really, I do. I played Alone In The Dark on 360 back in June, and it infuriated me. Quite rarely have I played a game with so many cool ideas and so much potential for greatness, and quite rarely have I played a major release by a major publisher that was such a buggy mess of a game. It was near unplayable, and any enjoyment you might’ve had from seeing all the cool ideas was squandered. So when I heard the PS3 game would fix the bugs and completely rework the controls, I was somewhat intrigued, and sure enough the once technical disaster is now a pretty cool game. The big positive is that the game is now no longer broken. There are still minor bugs here and there, but for the most part the game has that layer of polish a product as ambitious as this desperately needed. The controls are no longer a major issue, and the inventory is much easier to manage. It’s not the masterpiece it was billed as, but it’s pretty darn cool on PS3. However it seems the games reputation on 360 didn’t help as the PS3 version apparently sold 14 copies worldwide, as the game got a $30 price drop very quickly. For that price, it’s well worth your time.
8. Wario Land: Shake it!
I’ve never seen a company so beloved yet so despised at the exact same time as Nintendo. It’s like if a really nerdy fat kid tried out for the high school football team, found out he made a really good nost tackle, became a football star, and started hanging out with all the cool kids while his former nerdy friends now talk about how much they hate the guy even though they still secretly love the guy and wish he would come back to their side of the cafeteria. Unfortunately it’s pretty difficult to defend Nintendo right now if you like playing real videogames after the truly bafflingly awful year 2008 was for the little white box that could if you aren’t soccer mom. However there was one shining beacon set off by Nintendo to show you, the hardcore gamer, that there still are good people at Nintendo who make games for you. That game was Wario Land: Shake it! It’s a gorgeous old school 2D platformer with quite a bit of replay value, the Wii controls work great and there isn’t a single minigame to be found. If you would like some use out of your Wii, this would be a great place to start.
7. Kingdom Hearts RE: Chain Of Memories
Hard to believe a game with the words Kingdom Hearts in the title somehow went under the radar, but it happened. This past summer, I finally sat down and conquered the most glaring member of my personal backlog when I played and finished Kingdom Hearts. I then spent about a week kicking my own ass over why I had never taken the time to play that fucking incredible masterpiece. Before tackling the sequel, I wanted to play Chain of Memories on the GBA, and I wasn’t exactly enthralled. It’s a good game, but the thing that made me adore the original game was the overall impeccable production that it was, and you just can’t produce a game like that on the GBA. However that has been rectified with this game, which is a complete remake of the GBA game with all the bells and whistles the series is now known for. The voice acting and music are top notch, the card based combat is fun, and while it’s not as polished as its big brothers, RE: Chain Of Memories is great for someone like me, and at $30, it’s a steal.
6. Crysis Warhead
It’s a truly sad day for the PC game market when a game this amazing goes completely under the radar in most gaming circles. Crysis Warhead was easily the best FPS I played all year. It took the foundation that Crysis laid out and blew it away. While Crysis had more of an open “play it how you want to” kind of style to it, Warhead threw that out the window for a more focused, action orientated experience, and the game was a much more fun and better because of it. But the big reason Warhead was better then the original Crysis was the optimization. Crytek went back to the incredible engine they had built and retooled it not just to make the game look better (which it somehow does), but will play just fine on a medium range PC. If you’ve got the rig, and you love shooters, then shame on you for not playing Crysis Warhead, especially at the low price of $30.
5. Tales Of Vesperia
There were some great RPG’s that came out this year in the form of the stunning Lost Odyssey, the quite good Shim Megami Tensei Persona 4, and the BEST DS GAME EVARRRR in the form of The World Ends With You. However Tales Of Vesperia didn’t get the recognition it deserved. It is a absolutely gorgeous game with a great story and really well fleshed out and believable characters. The gameplay really hasn’t changed much since Tales Of Symphonia, and the game doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but what it does it does very well, and it is also quite long. If you need a good time sink, this game shall serve you well. But a word to the wise: make sure you’re buying Tales of Vesperia and NOT Tales Of Symphonia: Dawn Of The New World. That game is fucking terrible.
4. Naruto: The Broken Bond
If I was to make a list of the 10 most overlooked games of holiday 2007, near the top would’ve been Naruto: Rise Of A Ninja. While movie games have a reputation of sucking, games based on popular Anime tend to be just as bad if not worse. They suck for the exact same reason: A big company gets the rights, then hands the development over to whatever under staffed B team they can find and give them about 10 months to make a game so it can be released alongside either a movie or the season opener. Ubisoft decided against this. Instead, they handed the game over to their best developer (Ubisoft Montreal), gave them a couple of years, and made a gorgeous open world game with a simple but very fun fighting engine. One year later, and The Broken Bond maintains the high standard of the first game. It’s also a great way to get into the world of Naruto, as the two games are essentially a nice quick retelling of the first 110 episodes. Give it a shot, or at least try the original, as you can probably get it for around $15 now.
3. Yakuza 2
Frankly I’m just so happy/stunned this actually came out stateside that I don’t really care that it was overlooked. It’s the definition of niche’. A sequel to what was essentially a more violent Shenmue that sold poorly appearing on the PS2 with no English voice work. That’s not exactly a recipe for success. It’s a no frills sequel made pretty much exclusively for fans of the first game, and that’s more then good enough for me. It continues the fantastic story, fixes a couple of the major control problems I had with the original, looks good for a PS2 game (and it runs in 16:9, which is always a nice touch), and it was $30. I’ll take that. And all things, since Sega spent no money on marketing the game and spent very little on the translation, they probably made money on the game even though it probably only sold around 50,000 copies, and if that’s good enough to bring over Yakuza 3 and Yakuza Kanzan, that’s good enough for me.
2. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
God I wish more games were like this. While most modern games have decided to go “Hardcore” with all kinds of angst wearing 50 shades of brown and grey, along came Red Alert 3 to brighten my fall with the kind of bat shit crazy FMV cut scenes and cheesiness’ straight out of the PC gaming heyday of the mid 90′s. In what other game can I have Tim Curry as the première of Russia travel back in time to kill Albert Einstein? Where else will I see George Takai as the emperor of Japan in full on samurai get up ordering me around? What other game has armored grizzly bears as a support class? Will you see Jenny McCarthy as a scantly clad super spy in Resistance 2? I think not. And if all that wasn’t enough, there’s a pretty solid RTS under the hood, but the reason you play a game like Red Alert 3 is to witness the sheer lunacy on display. The game also just got a price drop, so you can get the 360 version for $40 or the superior PC version for $30 (Damn, half these games are $30 now) if you’ve got the rig. Did I mention David Hasselhoff plays the vice president of the Unites States? You don’t hassle the Hoff.
1. Valkyria Chronicles
Of all the games on this list of games nobody played or bought last fall, this was the most painful to put on the list. Valkyria Chronicles is, simply put, the best game of it’s kind since Final Fantasy Tactics. One look at this game and you’ll know why it’s so special. However it was the gameplay that put it over the top as it did the one thing no other JRPG did this year: It moved the genre forward. For the first time in years, I played a Japanese turned based RPG that actually felt original in it’s design and wasn’t afraid to take chances with a well worn formula. What a novel concept! Add to that a fantastic and mature story, and you have the makings of a instant classic…that nowhere near enough people experienced, and that’s a damn shame because I think it’s a game that could bring in fans to the genre. Games like this usually have a extremely high learning curve and cater to such a niche group that it’s refreshing to see a game like this try to make a JRPG for everyone. It also could’ve benefited from not being released in the middle of November. If this was released in July, it could’ve really flourished, but I guess we’ll never know now. Anyways, play it ASAP.
Related Posts
Tags: alone in the dark, blitz, command and conquer, crysis, kingdom hearts, naruto, tales of vesperia, valkyria chronicles, warioland, yakuza
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:32 am
When I listened to this week’s episode of DGR, Hilden’s mention of Pac-Man CE reminded me that Boric had given out some tips and tricks for Pac-Man CE on a previous episode of Broadcast Gamer. So, I went back and listened to the first episode in which we discussed Pac-Man CE, and about halfway through I remembered that Boric had also written an article for VGEvo to the same effect, so I didn’t end up listening to the whole thing.
One thing I did notice, though, was that you had written in to the mailbag for that week’s show, partially in response to Boric’s Backlog Box pick from the previous week, which was Kingdom Hearts 2. At the time, you advised him to keep playing, because after the first four hours the game gets really great. Initially, I was confused; but now, I’ve concluded that you must be the Benjamin Button of video games. At birth, you had played every game that would ever be created; and as time goes on, your memories of these games slowly fade away, one by one.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:22 pm
The Benjamin Button reference is accurate. The truth is that while it was true that I had never played Kingdom Hearts, I did play the first 6 hours or so of KHII just to see what all the hubub was about. The first 3 hours of the game (The Roxas crap) bored me to tears to the point where I almost stopped. Then Sora came into the picture and the game got intriging. Then the story became sorta incoherant because I didn’t play the first game, stopped playing KHII to play KHI, then preceeded to not play KHI for two years until earlier this summer.
Backlogs are a beautiful thing.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:37 pm
I always wanted to play the new old kingdom hearts, but the story of the GBA one is that nothing actually happens…besides…you know…the bubble.
An excuse to play a few missing boss fights I guess. Good times. I’ll wait till it’s $5.
I wish they’d just bring the Final Mix versions stateside.