No More Heroes was an entertaining, genre-refuting, tongue-in-cheek, satiric video game. It drew on grindhouse films, neo and traditional noir, and pop culture. It was truly refreshing, especially for a title released on the Wii circa 2008. The game had a reputation before it was even released, whether deserved or not, which stemmed from Suda 51’s earlier Gamecube title, Killer 7. It arrived with a whole lot of hype and opened to joyous reviews. Post-release reviews whittled the hype away significantly, thanks to the combat’s subtle mechanical flaws, the completely broken open-world setting, and the minigames. The minigames – like most of the game – were refreshing and fun in a twisted way, but so repetitive that their charms quickly faded. Despite these flaws, No More Heroes was pretty damn good.
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I was, and am, incredibly taken with the Stalker games. To a lot of players and reviewers these are fiddly, overly finicky PC games that specialize in bad acting, bad writing, and a seriously retrograde sense of game design (see the cutscenes, quest and map system, and the complete lack of vital information, at points).
Starcraft 2 approaches. Even a third of that product, however peculiarly released, must cow and alarm Blizzard’s competitors. While SC 2’s release date is doubtlessly a no-fly zone for RTS’s, the genre of RTS practiced by Blizzard must also be dangerous territory. Traditional RTS’s will always have to stand up to SC 2, and chances are, they’ll be found wanting (as the most recent Red Alert game was found wanting). What better way to escape the approaching storm than to proclaim loudly that one’s franchise is now not just an RTS?
You’ve got to hand it to Capybara: they released two of the best “smaller” videogames of 2009 within a few months of each other, and both happen to belong to a genre that I for one had been totally through with. You know a game type has officially reached saturation when Kotex makes their own clone, but Capybara proves that match-3 still has some life left in it. Critter Crunch combined the descending action of Space Invaders with a novel "food chain" matching mechanic to great effect. Clash of Heroes, on the other hand, tries its hand at providing an alternative to the Puzzle Quest-style match-3 RPG. This is a game created for everyone who, like me, devoured Gyromancer and Galactrix last year but were left feeling cold.
To boldly go… Those words may be the slogan of Star Trek, but they’re also perfectly suited to the world of MMORPGs. After all, once you strip away the crafting, killing, friend-making, and leveling, MMOs are really all about seeing new things and going new places. A boring world can break an otherwise interesting MMORPG (see my review of Fallen Earth for exactly how this happens), while an exciting, beautiful world can keep players playing long after the game’s bad mechanics have grown old (City of Heroes, for one).
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