But I don’t think any of the Infocom text adventures visited a place as vividly imagined and darkly memorable as Fallen London. I don’t remember the writing in those games being this good, although perhaps I was too young to appreciate it. is every bit as good as the classic Infocom text adventures. This is where you go to play the brilliant Echo Bazaar, recently renamed Fallen London and pried free of Facebook and Twitter. Story Nexus is a platform established by Echo Bazaar creator Failbetter Games. I love it when a developer has the confidence, experience, vision, competence, and balls to not listen to us. “Let them sulk and play their copies of Diablo II!” I love it when a developer does this. “Sacred cows and longtime fans be damned,” Blizzard cried. It is a velvet smooth, resistance free glide without the tough choices an RPG demands. It is the product of more than fifteen years of Blizzard whittling away at a genre they arguably invented, weighing carefully how best to get it right for the most people. But I have several high- to mid-level characters to show for it.ĭiablo III is a socks-on-hardwood-floors slide down a long corridor full of stuff to break and squish: earthenware pottery, old barrels, bubblewrap, honking squawking critters that need killing. Hard and long and in spite of some very real problems. This is a surprisingly thoughtful, delightfully atmospheric, smartly written, carefully designed game. You might have the power to wake it up, but it’s not yours to control. Waking Mars is full of surprises that all come down to nature being composed of interrelated systems, each affecting each other, each depending on each other. And as you progress deeper, the interaction of various systems gets more complex, and more delicate, and more expansive. Parts of the game remind me of planting gardens or feeding ducks. It’s up to you to fit the pieces together. The genius of Waking Mars is that where other games would have combat, or spells, or inventory, or the usual gameplay vocabulary, you instead get ecology. And now Criterion’s Need for Speed is one of the best open world arcade racers you can play, nearly on par with Rockstar’s brilliant Midnight Club: Los Angeles or Ubisoft’s curiously subversive Driver.Īlthough it’s now available on the PC, this is the first of two iOS games on my top ten list! Go, iPhone! This is the same franchise that loved to shunt you down long wending ribbons of predetermined road, and it’s the same developer who recently laid out a city in Burnout: Paradise without really understanding the point of an open world, much less the best way to do it. It constantly and keenly answers the question, “Why should I race?”, yet it offers a startling amount of freedom and flexibility. So this is what the Need for Speed and Burnout games have been building up to! So what if it’s missing the personality of Driver or Midnight Club: Los Angeles? But a heavy soldier with bullet swarm gets to fire before doing its two things, or an assault soldier with run-and-gun gets to move twice and then fire. For instance, a soldier only gets to do two things a turn. This is a design about establishing simple rules and then breaking them. XCOM owes more to the great boardgames of the 21st century than to the original X-Com. Sometimes boardgames can teach videogames a thing or three. Sometimes you can appeal to newcomers without alienating the hardcore fans. Sometimes you can update a classic without betraying it. So, mea culpa maxima.īut of the games I did play, here are my favorites for the year.Īfter the jump, the Qt3 trophies go to… 10) XCOM I’m not sure that any of these games would have made my top ten, but I never got around to trying the Walking Dead series, Mark of the Ninja, Hitman: Absolution, Guardians of Middle Earth, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Natural Selection 2, Last Story, Tokyo Jungle, Yakuza: Dead Souls, or Spec Ops: The Line.
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