bigsocrates

@BrockNRolla said:

Dead Space 2 is a great answer.

No one has said ME2 though? Really? It's a fantastic game, start to finish. So well paced and put together. How is it not the definition of polish?

How about because about 5 hours into the game my character floated up to the ceiling and couldn't get down? And I played after all the patches. Or a number of other bugs that remain in the game? You can argue that the story is polished but the game has its share of bugs.

More resources, more colleagues, more years working at Giant Bomb.

First of all, I wouldn't look to a big Sci-Fi franchise for gaming's "Moby Dick" or other equivalent to a work of great literature. The Mass Effect series is closer to a well-written sci-fi action/adventure series of books than anything that deep. You can't blame it for that.

I will say that I can understand why someone would enjoy Mass Effect 1 over the sequels. There was much more of a sense of a living breathing universe to explore back when you would just go down to random planets and find a thresher maw or some abandoned science outpost or whatever. In the sequels it feels like more attention was given to making sure the action sequences were more in line with the way they are in modern games, and less attention was given to making them fit into the world in an organic and interesting way (With small random encampments mixed in with the bigger stuff.) That's not to say it's the wrong choice, but it's definitely a choice that puts off some people.

I don't but probably should. To save shelf space I stripped all my games from last gen of their cases and manuals nd put them in binders, thinking I would play them on the backward compatible systems but I never do. I haven't touched a game from an earlier generation in years, unless you count HD remakes or virtual console stuff (went through a retro phase where most of what I played was NES or SNES virtual console gems). There are games I will play in the future like psychonauts but for the most part older games either suck or are availble on current gen systems. There are definitely exceptions, dozens of them, but the vast majority of stuff has aged poorly. As for current gen stuff I tell myself I may play it again, but mostly won't. Games like Mass Effect were too long to go through twice for me, and games like Brutal Legend were satisfying once, but no desire to go back.

@SethMode said:

X-Men for the NES.

Up until then I had SOMEHOW managed to buy games that were either stone cold classics (Gradius, the first game I bought with my own money) or at the very least memorable and fun (Bubble Bobble, probably overpriced for what you got, but I played the crap out of it)

LJN ended that streak with a vengeance.

If I played it today I could probably get further than I did as a kid, but back then I thought I must be doing something wrong because it just played like a whole lot of ass. What an awful game. I have bought a lot of crappy games because they were on sale or seemed cool since then, but X-men takes the cake in a lot of ways.

@damnable_fiend said:

pc :].

but uh, the ps3's best looking games look much better than those of the 360, usually. it's just that most games are developed for the 360, and so don't take advantage of the ps3 hardware.

I abstain from the vote.

It's not quite as simple as that. The Ps3 is harder to code for so teams who are not as experienced don't seem to be able to get as much out of it. Xbox got a lot of extra juice out of using PC-like components that developers were/are familiar with.

I own both but voted for Ps3 for a bunch of reasons, including much easier/cheaper hard drive replacement (neither machine was launched with an understanding of how much DLC/Arcade/PSN games one might accumulate over 6 years. Especially now that some games are clocking in at 2 gigs. That's 10% of a standard Xbox hard drive!) Blu-Ray, and the fact that it seems like developers are still squeezing more out of the PS3's complicated architecture, while the Xbox has been maxed out for awhile. That being said, I will admit that I play my Xbox more, mostly because of the controller and the lack of the Ps3's annoying firmware updates.

Oh, and I don't understand why we're arguing about interfaces when they're both piss poor at this point. The PS3 interface was always crappy with all kinds of settings and stuff buried, and the Xbox's new interface resembles nothing so much as a spammer's webpage you click on by mistake from a legitimate site.

It's like Microsoft wants to sell me everything under the sun and will only grudgingly let me use the stuff I've bought. On the 'home' screen for my Xbox there are 5 boxes, 3 of which are advertisements/notifications and 2 of which allow me to access SOME of my content. Want to look at ALL the games I own on the machine? Then I can scroll on over to games, 4 tabs away, and click on the tiny My Games box. Seriously? Meanwhile I have to deal with MS trying to sell me music and video content I have zero interest in just so I can play a couple levels of Splosion man or Shadow Complex or whatever.

Sony, for its part, doesn't care what I do but it's not going to make it easy for me. No sir! Realize that the credit card you had linked to your account was expired after you put a bunch of games you wanted in your cart on the PSN store? Well you have to leave the store to input a new card, and that, of course, OF COURSE, will empty your cart, so enjoy using the godawful interface to find that stuff again. Wanna watch Inception off that Blu-Ray you have in the drive? Enjoy scrolling over to video, PAST video services, and then all the way down to the bottom of the column. At least 75% of the time I use my Ps3 it's to access whatever content is on the disc in the drive, be it a movie or a game. Why isn't there a default selection on the home part that lets me access that disc-based content? Meanwhile if I want to access the Internet browser or do an Internet search, which I NEVER do, that's just a couple clicks of the D-pad away. Thanks Sony!

In terms of interface both consoles have aged like turds in the sun. And either company could fix these very basic problems, if they gave a damn.

It's good to see people enjoying Bulletstorm these days. I got it when it first came out, but in to do some Echo stuff and it's just a really fun shooter that seems to be nearly forgotten only a year after its release. It's a totally different experience than your Call of Duties or Gears of War games.

With those kinds of glaring oversights I'm not even sure that I should take these game of the year deliberations seriously anymore. I would like to add that it was very unprofessional for the site to select Nolan North as winner of the Northie award, probably the most coveted award in videogame voice acting, so soon after his visit to the office. It's one thing to run a series of features on Bastion and have it remain eligible for the awards many months later, but Nolan North's visit was basically DURING deliberations, and they must have known he had a shot at a Northie. They should have either refused the visit or disqualified him from the award if they want to be taken seriously as serious arbiters of what was best.

Didn't see the upset coming before the games were released, but if you listen to the bombcasts its not that surprising. There was a TON of love for the SR3.

I think it helps Saints Row 3 that its a contained and beatable experience, while Skyrim seems kind of like a monumental timesink when you're rushing to play everything for game of the review purposes.