I don't have any great, high-minded reason to be posting this, aside from feeling the urge to remind myself of the upcoming games I'm looking forward to, post-E3. I can't claim that this list is anything but mainstream, but it's at least plugged-in, and has helped me remember that there are a lot of exciting new titles just around the bend.
Most Anticipated overall:
The Last Guardian:
Viewing the original (leaked) trailer for the new game from Team Ico last month ended my mind and left my mouth hanging open. Every element of the game seems so perfectly conceptually balanced-- the platforming and friendly AI of Ico meets the epic creature scale of Shadow of the Colossus. The creature itself instantly captured my imagination-- a baby giant, a presence that at once feels innocent, friendly and clumsy in its youth, but dangerous and imposing in its stature-- and the spears and arrows dangling from its flesh imply a vulnerability that might cast the player as his occasional protector as well. The single technical and interactive challenge they've chosen-- a complex, friendly AI with the scale and interactivity to meaningfully impact the player's navigation of the gameworld-- is incredibly inspiring for me from both a designer's and player's perspective. I can't wait to befriend this strange, wonderous creature and see what new aspects of Team Ico's unique fictional world he'll help reveal. The one misgiving I have is a stealth element hinted at by the trailers. I have confidence in Team Ico in pretty much every regard, but their games also aren't perfect, and stealth is very easy to screw up in an extremely frustrating fashion. Regardless, the mere promise of this game should be enough to remind any designer of the potential for novel expression that big-budget game development holds.
Outright sequels:
Super Mario Galaxy 2:
The sequel to what I would have personally awarded Game of the Year in 2007 (even over BioShock and Portal!) has been announced. I was honestly surprised, as it hasn't been Nintendo's habit since Mario 64 to directly sequelize their flagship Mario titles. But more Galaxy, plus Yoshi, is nothing to sneeze at. Some games feature such great core premises that more content alone is draw enough to foster legitimate excitement, and Mario Galaxy is one of those games. Bring on more weird floating space orbs! And Yoshi.
No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle:
Being a huge fan of the ethos and execution of No More Heroes (and Killer7 before it, though to a lesser extent,) I was excited to hear that NMH was getting a sequel, as I'd never heard it performed especially well at market-- it was cited fairly often as "proof" that hardcore games were destined to fail on the Wii. But again, more original content set in Travis Touchdown's wild world of otaku, beam swords, hipster t-shirts and world-renowned assassins is more than enough for me. Bring it on!
Mafia 2:
The first Mafia game (by the former Illusion Softworks, now 2K Czech) was one of my favorite games of the early 2000's. I was especially impressed by the mature (not "M for Mature") story and characters, and the sober characterization of the gameworld itself: you had to live as a civilian in the city of Lost Heaven, as opposed to being a rocket-launcher-wielding immortal. The characters were human and believable, their arcs were compelling, and it all wrapped up in a satisfying and melancholy conclusion. I was especially impressed with how little the game's narrative pandered to a juvenile audience-- no ultraviolence or fantastical wish fulfillment, no reliance on "nerdy" tropes that even other notable story games of the time-- Half-Life, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Planescape Torment-- copped to. Not all games need to be so grounded, but Mafia impressed me with the degree to which it felt so ahead of its time in this respect. Mafia 2, due some 8 years after the original, promises a similarly deep fiction, with perhaps a greater emphasis on high-octane action and forgiveness of player misbehavior, along with an even richer, more absorbing, living gameworld. I can't wait to play the game that 2K Czech have been toiling over in those intervening years.
Mass Effect 2:
Another game where "more of the same, but better" is fine by me. I played through Mass Effect at its release and have felt the urge to replay it a number of times since, but I'm holding out for the sequel. As a normative nerd type, I'm excited to explore the Blade Runner-esque city of blackened highrises and flying cars depicted in the game's trailers, to meet new partymembers such as "the greatest assassin in the universe," and to carry over my character from the first game in classic RPG style. I look forward to returning to Bioware's Star Wars-meets-Star Trek universe and experiencing the sequel team's "darker, grittier" approach to the material.
Red Dead Redemption:
Reading McCarthy novels like Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses has made me want a game set in a more grim, grounded version of the rural west than those offered by, say, Neversoft's Gun or the original Red Dead Revolver, and Red Dead Redemption seems poised to deliver just that. Rockstar is clearly trending more intently toward "serious" takes on their subject matter (just look at GTA4's, and even more pointedly The Lost & Damned's, depressing view of Liberty City,) and the Capital Wasteland has sold me on the potential for exploring a huge, open no-man's land. Red Dead Redemption promises an unsettled plain dotted with fledgling frontier towns, trappers' camps and cavalry forts, and even "a complete ecology" wherein hawks snap up jackrabbits and coyotes descend upon NPC's campsites in the wild. I can't wait to explore Rockstar's vision of the American frontier.
Not sequels:
Little King's Story:
I was turned on to Little King's Story by Edge's review, which speaks more or less directly to me when it says: "Perhaps the game’s greatest achievement... is a constant focus on you, the player, delicately changing the world as your kingdom expands." Something of a (I'm guessing accidental) cross between Dungeon Keeper, Pikmin, and Civilization, the player controls the Little King, who runs around the gameworld throwing his subjects at obstacles in order to clear rocks and trees, gather resources, build towns and defeat enemy armies in his quest to oust all the other nefarious kings in the world, spreading the borders of his kingdom to the four corners of the map. The tone and style sound irreverently self-aware, and watching your territory expand is always satisfying. I expect it to be incredibly original, and the glowing reviews floating around only buoy my excitement to play it.
Scribblenauts:
The breakout hit of E3 probably doesn't need much introduction at this point, but suffice it to say that one play session of the game produced a battle between a giant Kraken, Einstein, and God, all on the Nintendo DS. The player can type in any concept they can think of, and more often than not it's been created in pixel form by the game's developers, appears onscreen, and goes to work interacting with whatever else has been spawned. Einstein might eat cherries, be flammable, and apparently goes aggro on God. Stories told from E3 playtesters include spawning a time machine which transported the player back to the time of the dinosaurs, then spawning a meteor which caused all the dinosaurs to go extinct. Even Keyboard Cat was present. Sample puzzle objectives include reaching a star high up on a perch, or getting a beached whale back into the water. Do you go the simple route (for instance, spawning a ladder to climb up to the star) or do you spawn the most gonzo conceptual Rube Goldberg device you can imagine? As Crayon Physics Deluxe is to player-generated physics interactions, Scribblenauts is to conceptual emergence, and hot damn am I eager to see all of the insanity that's guaranteed to result.
Night Game:
4 comments:
Hmm..I'm really hyped about a lot of these. I haven't heard of Infinite Space before, but a DS space opera is always a good thing in my book.
If only I can afford to buy and play them all.. yum yum.
But yeah, Lost Planet2 and Borderland got me especially hyped out of this list.
You've achieved a strange level of irony, expressing admiration for Killer7, yet concern that Red Steel 2 might be too linear.
But then, it makes sense to me: I'm a Suda fan as well. And I recommend Flower, Sun and Rain as the funniest game I've ever played of his. A sunnier, sillier Twin Peaks. (Aside: the computer-in-a-briefcase is not alive/sentient, though the main character insists on referring to it as "My partner, Catherine.")
Mafia 2 will be the best game of 2010, mark my words : ).
I agree with lot of those - Fallout New Vegas is my current number 2 anticipated game, the third one is fifth Hitman.I wish they would finally show him, but I guess they Eidos will now concentrate on the new Batman game.
But since the release dates for Hitmans were 2000,2002,2004,2006, and now it is 09 and the game is not even announced, I wonder what takes so long.Kane and Lynch was made by second internal team I think.
I stopped completely in love at the last guardian. How charming is that?
I just want to jump right in and play.
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