The legendary Tekken franchise makes its latest home console appearance as Tekken 6, a port of the updated arcade machine variant - Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion. A solid four years after its last iteration Tekken 5 was released on the PlayStation 2 system (not counting the HD PSN remake for PS3), Tekken 6 unbelievably contains an even bigger roster. But with this year already playing host to Street Fighter IV and the new contender BlazBlue, does it match up to the heavyweights?
The Tekken storyline gets more and more complex as the series progresses, with each evil Mishima family offspring (Jin, Kazuya and Heihachi) and his plans of world domination causing somewhat catastrophic wide spread damage and then, overconfidently, yet foolishly, the diabolical dictator providing an opening, to be overthrown by the others, in the form of a King of Iron Fist Tournament. Tekken 6 has Jin going psychotic and hosting the tournament, but his intentions somehow involve the greater demonic powers of the newly discovered ancient deity Azazel. At least the story writers can’t be blamed for slacking off, but as with most fighting games, the story hardly matters.
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It was great to have sequels to popular franchises such as Call of Duty, Halo, Uncharted, Killzone, Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed, all in one year. But an unfortunate side effect to such a glut of big budget sequels was that some great games that lacked the hype or rich pedigree went by largely unnoticed. We give these quality titles their due in our Best Game No One Played category.
Plants vs Zombies was 2009’s World of Goo; a little indie PC game that no one saw coming, but one that demanded everyone’s attention once it was here. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is a brilliant sequel to a good, if somewhat unpolished, game. It looks good, it plays well, it tells an engaging story, and it’s one of the best Wild West games to come along in a while. Red Faction: Guerrilla is a drastic change in direction for the series. What used to be a linear first-person shooter, is now an open-world third-person action game. The highlight was the game’s Geomod 2.0 engine, which helped deliver environmental destruction unlike anything we’ve seen before.
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Telling a tale - whether it be about a tail or not - is easy. Getting others to sit through it is not easy. When it’s a video game it gets substantially harder because the player has a say in where the story goes. This year we’ve introduced a new category to honour those games which took up the challenge of presenting an engaging, thought provoking, entertaining story.
Brutal Legend is a rollicking love story set in the world of metal splattered, rather than polished, with Tim Schafer’s legendary craft. The twists in this composition more than make up for the disappointing gameplay, and the age old story of the hero discovering and coming to terms with his past is presented on a platter made up of guitar and drums for our aural pleasure. The Wild West has always been the setting for epic twisted storylines, and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood delivers one of the best adventures in recent times in the midst of sand, bullets and horses. This story of two brothers takes everything we love out of Westerns and presents a tale which will be impossible to disregard - there’s honour, betrayal, tragedy, politics, alliances and heartbreak. Giddy up and enjoy!
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A great character can carry a mediocre game on his/her shoulders. Some of them catapult an already great game into legendary status. And a few stay with us much after we’ve forgotten the game. This is one of the new categories we’ve introduced this year because we wanted to recognise the efforts to bring a few polygons to life using outstanding dialogue and voice acting.
Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins has so many layers to him, but what oozes most from him is his charm, and once that sheds away, his vulnerability about his circumstances. He is a pawn in the great game of politics in Ferelden, yet he never loses heart or his sense of humour. Cigar chomping, handlebar moustachioed Captain Price returns in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as Makarov’s nemesis. There is a moment when his actions are a bit loopy, but we will put it down to the years spent in the Gulag. He saves the day once again with the faithful Soap MacTavish. It must be the moustache.
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If analogies were to be drawn between gaming and movies, shooters would surely be the equivalent of big budget blockbusters. Being the greatest proponents of the modern day rage that is online multiplayer gaming, a great shooter can be a big contributor to the console’s overall success.
In fact, the emphasis on multiplayer often leaves the developers guilty of ignoring the single player component of shooters. 2009, however, was unique by featuring a lot of diversity in the genre, and each of the nominees had its own unique claim to fame. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood grabbed eyeballs through its Wild West setting and a strong story. The cooperative shooter space was filled admirably by Left4Dead 2 and Borderlands, designed from the ground up to bond with friends by sharing beautiful moments of bloodshed and destruction in a zombie-infested world and a hostile alien planet respectively.
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2009 was a good year if you’re an RTS fan. The sheer amount of variety we had in different RTS games that were released last year was amazing to see. And nowhere was this reflected better than in our nominees for Strategy Game of the Year.
Both Anno 1404 and Tropico had great city building mechanics. They were easy to get into and almost impossible to get out of. Empire: Total War and Hearts of Iron focused on historical combat at a larger scale than any other game released. Halo Wars merged the tried and tested formula of Age of Empires with the Halo universe and threw in some stunning CGI cutscenes to make it stand out. But it was Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War II, with its mixture of RPG and RTS elements, which came away with the majority of the votes and won our Best Strategy Game of 2009 crown.
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There are some games that are built around co-op, some that offer co-op as a secondary option, and others in which co-op is included as a game mode separate from the campaign. 2009 had fine examples of each of those, allowing us to enjoy these great games in more ways than one.
The IVG popular vote went to Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which is impressive considering the first game had no multi-player options whatsoever. While it didn’t include a campaign co-op option, it did have a somewhat story-driven three-player co-op mode that allowed you to play many of the story mode levels in a new way. The missions featured cutscenes and an (if somewhat basic) narrative packed in with several set pieces similar to those that made the single-player campaign so enjoyable. There was also a Survival mode similar to Horde mode in Gears of War 2, as well as Gold Rush, a similar survival mode, but with an objective (other than simply surviving).
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When you have a year full of great games, you no doubt have many epic moments spread out amongst them. So even selecting a list of nominees for this category was a daunting task. Arguably the biggest heart-stopping moment in a game this year came in Batman: Arkham Asylum. Each Scarecrow encounter in the game was a memorable one, but the third one in particular really stands out because (without spoiling it for anyone who is yet to play the game) it made you question what you were experiencing in a way games seldom manage to do.
The stunning opening cinematic from Halo 3: ODST deserves a mention as well, as do the final level from Flower and the conclusion to Assassin’s Creed 2, which raised as many questions as it answered and set up the third instalment in the series rather well. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was a game where you just seemed to jump from one epic moment to another and we could very well have filled up all the nominations from this game itself. But we finally decided on two that stood out the most, and these were the two nominees that picked up the most votes.
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There’s no way to sugar coat this one – 2009 was not a good year for sports games; at least not the kind we play in India. While MLB 09: The Show, NHL 10, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 and the NBA games from EA and 2K were all great, no one cares for those games in these parts. So for us, the picture wasn’t quite as rosy.
The nominees this year in the IVG poll for Best Sports Game included NBA Live 10 and Pro Evolution Soccer 2010, which not more than a handful of IVG members would have played, so they never really stood a chance in the poll. Fight Night Round 4, while a fairly good follow-up to the brilliant FNR3, again didn’t find too many takers around here. So it was a two way battle between Ashes Cricket 2009 and FIFA 10.
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2009 wasn’t the best year for new IP. Like most experts, let’s just blame it all on recession and assume that publishers felt they were better off investing in existing IP rather than risk new ones and lose money. Jokes apart, new IP are the backbone of the gaming industry, because not only is it important to remember that every Goliath in gaming started off as a David, but new IP are a perfect way to bring new ideas and a fresh perspective to the table.
And IVG’s pick for the Best New IP of 2009 is the perfect example of a fresh perspective on a license that has been ailing from a steady stream of poor to mediocre games. Rocksteady created what is arguably the best Batman (and superhero) video game in Batman: Arkham Asylum and kicked off a series which could very well set the standard on how to make superhero videogames. The near perfect realisation of characters from the Batman universe, coupled with a brilliant atmosphere that rivals Bioshock in execution, and immaculate pacing gave gamers the most authentic Batman experience till date.
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