Honestly, I had not even thought about coming up with a Game of the Year until Joe Haygood sent 'round an email saying he wanted to compile a GOTY awards article from the Aeropause staff writers. So then it became, I guess, a responsibility.
You know, 2008 was a great goddamn year. A lot of favorite franchises showed up swinging, which ought to be expected in Year Two of a console's lifespan. (I'm lumping Nov/Dec 2006 in with 2007 as Year One, which makes 2008 the Two. And I'm ignoring the 360 entirely, which has become a character trait with me by this point.) For Y2, you've gotta figure that the best series of the previous generation will arrive with all the benefits of whatever it is that the new gen can offer.
Let's generalize. Year One is the tech demo year. Year Two is the expectations fulfilled year. Year Three is the potential fully realized year (but no one will admit it). Year Four is the glut year. And Year Five is the you're-lucky-to-get-anything year, because everyone is already deep into the tech demos for the next Year One.
Right off, I knew I had four GOTY possibles for Year Two. Super Smash Brothers Brawl, LittleBigPlanet, Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4.
And plenty others that were close or close-to-close, but various important factors kept them out of contention. Rock Band 2 is really just a polished-up Rock Band 1 pushed to retail so as to keep the brand alive in the onslaught of shitty uses of the phrase "Guitar Hero." No More Heroes tried to wield "ugly" as a design choice... but ugly is never a good design choice. Ninjatown, Professor Layton and PixelJunk Monsters are not epic enough, not big enough for a GOTY. Soulcalibur IV still couldn't gin up a decent replay mode. Mario Kart Wii dumped the best bits of Double Dash and doesn't have enough new tracks. LEGO Batman made no attempt to fix three-year-old co-op mode flaws. Burnout Paradise is still just a car game, and Buzz Quiz TV has already asked me way too many times to identify which Madonna albums were not released in the '90s.
But those are ten really great games, each a well of hours and hours of my 2008. Just perhaps with a critical fail there, a minor flub here, a general ennui in the middle... that certain something(s) that, in my mind, keeps them from playing at the same level as the top four.
Taken as a unit, jesus. What a time. And I'm sort of proud that those fourteen games cover a wide range of genres, styles, tones, companies, IPs, sizes and art direction. And that's not even including all the stuff I played that I would place on a tier below that, whether it came out in 2008 or not.
But back to those four. All of them are huge. Can be played for weeks straight without losing momentum. Recession-proof entertainment. Can be put away for months, then re-opened and still hold up to the latest new releases. And really, at the moment, I don't see anything in the immediate future that looks to compare to those four (but that's probably because a lot of what I'm tracking for 2009 is wholly original and untested, so we don't really know what to expect. Madworld, InFamous, Deadly Creatures, Cursed Mountain, Fat Princess and Flower could all totally suck, for all we know.)
But I had to vote for the best for the poll's purposes, so I had to decide.
And I think it's GTAIV.
MGS4 does not get it because it is the most storyline-focused and therefore the most linear. Now, I LOVE those characters and that storyline, and I've been through it 2.5 times now... in fact just talking about it makes me itchy to go play it again. But there's no way I can rank it above anything that provides story, characters AND non-linear sandbox play (although each level in and of itself is a free-to-explore experience). Not to mention that firing up MGS4 - any Metal Gear, really - is a known time investment. You can't just pick it up and quickplay in the way you can the other three games.
But what makes it one of the best is that Lynchian experience: the strange characters, the bizarre plot points, the fourth-wall-breaking moments.
LittleBigPlanet does not get it because of that damn screwy back-mid-fore-ground floaty predictive jumping issue. There's been way too many times that I have to fight that while playing, and every new player needs half an hour to suss it out. I think the three-slice presentation is a brilliant way to add depth to the traditional platformer, without making things so fully 3D that it becomes impossibly complex for players to make their own levels... but there has to be a better way to tune those jumps.
Nevertheless LBP remains a gigantic accomplishment for art direction, for user empowerment, for DLC expandability, and for genuine fun appeal.
Brawl does not get it because Brawl is hampered by Nintendo's comfortable flakiness. There's no easy online social networking solution, there's the WTF lack of Remote point control as soon as the game boots up, you can't compare accomplishments with online friends (trophies, stickers, unlockables), and there's no good reason why a portion of the Melee lineup (fighters AND levels) was cut.
Regardless, Brawl stands as THE Wii game. A neverending French kiss between Nintendo and 20 years of nostalgia, packed with discovery and surprises.
Any one of those could be Game of the Year, but there's something tactile and personal about Grand Theft Auto IV that inches it ahead. Inches. Rather than doing a lot of things half-assed, the GTA series does a lot of things really well. Driving, exploring, stats-tracking, cutscenes, details... even the targeting system has been shined up for GTAIV (once you realize that any fight involving guns needs to be played smart with lots of cover, not avalanched like a One Man Army FPS).
Are you tired of all the puerile humor? It's in there, all right. Much of it is legitimate social satire (like "America's Next Top Hooker") and plenty of snorty juvenilia (like "Easy Lay Carpeting"), but it's all eminently avoidable. It's not like the game demands you stare at street signs, watch TV, or listen to the radio. It just happens; it's background. It's a parody of American culture and a damn good one at that.
Are you weary of the violence, sex and drugs? Niko is, I think, Rockstar's most moral hero to date. Niko is clearly disgusted by the drug habits of the people he meets. He is almost never shown drinking in cutscenes. He is extraordinarily empathetic to characters in trouble. He is an unfortunate soul in an unfortunate world... but, as he himself says, he can't get out because he doesn't know what else to do.
The GTA series consistently ranks among my favorites because it provides the gaming experience most dear to me: being dropped into a giant, fully functioning universe without worry of other human influences wrecking shop. It's a great showing for 2008 that three other games came so close to the peak.
So there you are. I didn't really want to pick one, but under extreme duress I did so.
