It’s 2009. To many 2008 was a terrible year. A lot of incredibly bad things happened, especially to our economy. It’s definitely a poor time for me to be unemployed, that’s for sure. So a lot of people were looking forward to 2009. We have this weird notion that we can start over at the beginning of the year as if we can put the last month behind us as long as it’s January. Unfortunately for many, 2009 started out with a whimper and a cry. The gaming enthusiast press is dying. Hell, the print media is dying. On January 6th, UGO bought 1Up. Now for those of you who don’t know, UGO is one of the tritest websites that I know of. Here is an example of what they consider video games “journalism”. 1Up on the other hand was a great site which drew many people from around the industry with its honest editorials and podcasts with personality. People went to 1Up and read its magazine EGM not to get numbers and reviews from a website but to get the opinions of dozens of personalities that they trust. Editors and writers like Garnett Lee and Shane Bettenhausen came together to talk to other industry insiders as well as 1Up alum about games and it felt personal. It wasn’t PR trash. It wasn’t trying to get you to buy any certain product, but honest discussion about video games.
When UGO bought 1Up, 80% of the staff at the 1Up offices got laid off. EGM (one of the longest running gaming magazines) got shut down as well. This mass decimation is a huge blow to the gaming enthusiast community. It can be seen as a slow death of the gaming enthusiast press. What else do we have? Blogs? Those are 99% shit. No offense to those that run those sites, but it’s definitely hard to wade through the crap that people throw on there to saturate their RSS feeds. Without a strong site for the community to rally around, the quality of the community falters. Are we limited to using twitter to keep up with these journalists and NeoGAF to keep the community alive? Where will the industry take us once all the leaders are gone?
Perhaps from the ashes of corporate-backed journalism will rise a renaissance of high quality gaming journalism in the form of independent websites and blogs. Perhaps it will be like 1998 again, where all gaming websites were done by fans, or at least the best ones were (except this time we’d have CSS to make web design much easier and more appealing). I hope so. I really hope so.
This week has been fairly eventful for me and for video games in general. We saw the release of Burnout Paradise, No More Heroes, Endless Ocean, and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. There were likely a few others but nothing that caught my attention. I’ve only had a chance to play two of these games, but I must say, they were amazing.
I expected Burnout Paradise to be great from the hype I’ve heard on the 1Up Yours Podcast. For those who don’t know, Burnout is a racing game series where one of the main features (if not the main feature) is you try to get your opponents to crash. Some modes let you crash your car to create as much damage as you can. What separates Paradise from the rest of the series is that it has an open-ended world, as opposed to just having races that you pick and choose from with defined courses. In Paradise you start events at different places in Paradise City, which tell you to go somewhere (one of eight destinations) with some objective like get there first or get there without being totaled or take down as many opponents as you can. Basically it took the original race course formula and turned it into a point A to point B race in a world that is explorable. You can choose your own path. Of course there are downsides. The game can’t handle local multiplayer (but the robust online features more than makes up for that). It’s pretty easy to get lost. All in all, it’s a very solid game.
The other game I played this week is Suda 51’s greatly anticipated No More Heroes. I played his prior game, Killer 7 and really enjoyed it despite how much others disliked it. It was a good game, definitely not amazing, but a pretty solid game. So from that experience and the fact that the Wii library is filled with solid but not very amazing games I expected this game to be just a good game. But much to my surprise, I later heard that X-Play gave it a 5 out of 5 (in the same episode, they gave Burnout Paradise a 4). So I really had to try it out; so I did. I must say, it’s really good. Using a cel-shaded look not unlike Killer 7, it oozes style. But unlike Suda 51’s prior game, it’s much more developed and a lot less confusing. It actually makes some sort of sense. The game is along the lines of a beat-em-up. You play the role of a new assassin named Travis Touchdown (haha) and your main objective is to kill other higher ranking assassins to become the number one assassin, who all for some reason live in this messed up town called Santa Destroy (I’m not kidding). Travis’ weapon of choice is a beam saber that you bought off eBay, so most of the attacks you do are sword slashes. The battles are quite fun, the controls are some of the best done on the Wii. Between missions you are trying to earn money (in order to get set up to fight other assassins) by doing odd jobs like picking up coconuts or mowing lawns. There are also a few simple assassinations you can do for money. The thing about No More Heroes is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a game that knows it’s a game and it makes fun of that fact. Most of the user interface uses an 8-bit sprite style. There are quite a few Star Wars references. It even makes fun of video gamers with a subtle jab. There’s no question about it, No More Heroes is a gamer’s game. It doesn’t take itself too seriously (the save points are toilets) and it does what it set out to do extremely well. I highly recommend it to anyone that likes games.