T w e n t y S i d e d

Like this post, Portal 2 was just too dang short. The puzzles were probably too easy. People claim the multiplayer aspect fixes this. I don’t know. By the time I was ready for multiplayer, my friends had finished it already. There didn’t seem to be much point in running through these and having them watch me solve old puzzles, so I still haven’t played with anyone else. Let us set team play aside and focus on the single player experience.

This was a perfect game. From beginning to end, this game was a delight. I laughed at the jokes. I was charmed by the characters. I was surprised by the plot twist[s], and I reveled in the atmosphere. There was never a moment where I stopped having fun, or was annoyed by the game, or a joke fell flat, or the experience was ruined by some bug. Like I said: Perfect.

Portal 2 was cheaper than Skyrim, but both were priced as AAA games. Yet in the time I’ve spent getting to know Skyrim, I could have run through Portal 2 about 30 times. Which is better: The perfect snack, or a six-course dinner where the bread was stale, the waiter dumped your drink in your lap, and you find a chicken bone in the soup? I don’t know. I guess it depends on how hungry you are.

After the credits rolled, I was ready to give Portal 2 my Game of the Year. Now I don’t think I could give that honor to any single game. The trade-off between quantity and quality is a perilous one, and there is a right answer. As a consumer, I obviously always want my games to have both excellence and playtime. I want both, always, as much as possible. The only hard rule I have is that a game really ought to have one or the other.

Having said that: We could do with a few more perfect games.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

How is anyone supposed to rate or even discuss this game objectively? It’s a sequel to a beloved and revered classic. (Whether or not the original deserves to be revered is a thorny discussion we can leave for another time.) This game is unlike the original in terms of gameplay and style, yet it preserves the original premise, tone, and continuity. (Or reverse-continutiy. Or whatever you call it when you make a prequel.) It’s not nearly as freeform as the original, yet it’s far more freeform than its current-day contemporaries. It’s smaller than the original, yet larger than most shooters. It has a slick, appealing aesthetic, yet that aesthetic doesn’t match the one in the original game.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2011: Deus Ex: Human Revolution”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I sort of gave Minecraft my unofficial Game of The Year last year. Most people avoided doing that because the game wasn’t “done” yet.

The endpoint of Minecraft development is a somewhat nebulous thing. A year ago the game offered a fully playable experience that dwarfed the playtime of most big-budget games. It was fun, diverse, and stable, even though it was in beta. Now it’s released, but more updates are planned. So it seems like this “final” build is arbitrarily so. Either the game was done ages ago or it’s not done yet.

But whatever. I guess it’s done whenever the developer says it is. Since it was offically released this year, I thought I’d talk about this not-final build of the game and the new features it added. I was actually very disappointed in it. Throughout development I felt like each new version was a nice improvement, but Minecraft 1.0 added a bunch of things I dislike to the game.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2011: Minecraft”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.