Is 2006 an underrated year? I feel like my top 10 this year is killer.
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It makes perfect sense to me that prior to the 2016 soft reboot, Blood Money was popularly considered the best Hitman game. It softens some of the series' harder edges, making for a friendlier game, and widens the player's tool set to allow for a wider range of lethal and non-lethal options. Levels in Hitmans one-through-three would essentially collapse if the player decided to go in guns blazing; civilians would panic and nonsensically return to their routines, enemies from across the level would magically deduce the players' position, etc. Unlike Hitman: Codename 47, Hitman 2, or most especially Hitman Contracts, Blood Money emphasizes comedy and/or systems-driven catastrophe as an acceptable or even preferable outcome of player choice. Blood Money signals this primarily via character design. NPCs are caricatures in this game; they're crude depictions of classic crime-movie stereotypes. Their dialogue is written to be roughly equivalent with an American Pie film. This unseriousness in tone and characterization goes beyond an aesthetic choice - it's crucial to the function of many Blood Money levels. 2006 was a time of extreme moral panic around video games in America - the fact that Blood Money is a video game in which the player can essentially choose to stage a mass shooting in an American suburb without public backlash comes largely down to the fact that virtually everyone in the game world feels like a parody of a human being. Of course, the fact that Blood Money's violence lacks gore or tremendous amounts of bloodshed also helps a great deal. A lot of the way people consider the Hitman franchise is directly formulated here, in Blood Money. Nearly all of Blood Money's levels are based around singular high concepts. Consider how Hitman levels have worked up to this point. Hitman: Codename 47 and Hitman 2: Silent Assassins staged assassinations around broad, spy movie concepts like motorcade assassinations and the infiltration of underground Russian prisons. Contracts, especially, featured levels with unusual concepts in which 47's role isn't immediately clear. When you start a Contracts level in which 47 is infiltrating a rave in a meat-packaging factory or a level in which he's interrupting a weapons deal aboard a submarine, the big-ticket, set piece kill could be anything. This is not the case in Blood Money. When you start a level in which 47 infiltrates an opera house as the cast rehearse an execution scene, you *immediately* understand how the set piece kill is going to work. When you start a mission that tasks you with assassinating the groom in a wedding - especially when the priest and the cake are holding up the start of the ceremony - you immediately understand what your options are. Blood Money doesn't challenge you to find a solution to the puzzle, exactly - it gives you the solution right away. The challenge is all in the how, not in the what. The new Hitman titles operate much in the same way, and this ideation of the Hitman formula alone is a *huge* factor in those games' success. So long as there is a super clear, coherent throughline in the completion of a level, players will stick with it regardless of how open or dynamic the level design is. That clarity of purpose eliminates the potential for frustration or lack of clarity and, I think, actually frees players up to be *more* experimental than if they were given no clear throughline at all.
Bully is one of Rockstar's best games. The fact that it demarcated an end to a certain style of Rockstar game rather than a new era of Rockstar game is a tragedy. Rockstar games are defined by their fatalism - sometimes by their nihilism - but Bully, while mean-spirited, is anything but nihilistic. At its core, this is a game about an institution undermining the health and wellbeing of a generation, as well as the generation's response to that dehumanization. Bully's antagonist is the nihilist of the story, not the player character; the player character builds camaraderie within each of the school's discrete social groups.
Dead Rising is basically a silly, hyper video-game-y adaptation of Dawn of the Dead - so much so, that the packaging of the original game actually contained a note that it was legally obligated to tell you it took inspiration from Dawn of the Dead - but it's not a surface level adaptation. George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were vehicles for social commentary, in which zombies were a conceptual vector for the concepts of consumerism and the obliteration of individuality at the hands of groupthink. Dead Rising adapts those concepts for the modern age: the zombies in this game spawn from a project designed to endlessly clone and replicate meat for a consumer base who purchase and consumer it on an exponentially higher scale than ever before in history. Choosing to cast the player as a journalist feels significant: causing havoc in a shopping mall might be the reason you show up, but what you end up doing is documenting the consumerism apocalypse.
Double Agent has this excellent conceit, and it gets there in this hilariously clumsy way: Sam Fisher's life is ruined when his daughter dies in an off-screen accident, and lacking a reason to live, volunteers to undertake a suicide mission as a double agent within an incoherent terrorist organization. There's a lot of interest in the "what" but little interest in the "why," in other words, and a lot of Double Agent can be unpacked from there. What Double Agent wants to do is to continue to put the player in situations in which morally good actions in the immediate may lay to catastrophic consequences down the line. Besides suddenly imbuing the Splinter Cell formula with much higher and more evident stakes, this also creates a genuinely fascinating push and pull for the player: you can't simply be the perfect spy. Sometimes it's in your best interest to act in opposition to your handlers for the greater mission. It gets even more complicated once you start to build relationships with people in the terrorist organization, some of whom are more redeemable than others. Ultimately, Double Agent would've benefited from more nuance in the level design and harsher restrictions on potential actions depending on faction alignment, but this was still a bold re-imagining of what the Splinter Cell series could do.
This was my first Bethesda title, and I didn't really 'get it' at the time. I'd like to revisit Oblivion some day, but it stands out most distinctly in my mind for its generic high fantasy setting and feel. It's this wide open world with infinite possibilities, which happens to also be the most boring snapshot of corny fantasy shit possible.
Elite Beat Agents is one of several Nintendo-exclusive series which, despite being this incredible, scope-expanding title, has gone completely forgotten by its publisher. This partly comes down to the fact that Elite Beat Agents is the rare *perfect* touch-based rhythm game published by a company who gets really weird about releasing games on cell phones, but still.
Gears of War is sort of complicated to unpack, because it's simultaneously an ingenious piece of game design and a transparently adolescent power fantasy. In its favor, I'll at least say that the adolescent power fantasy is also very good. The part of the Gears campaign that really works is that the setting is the really creative part. I don't really love the Locust or find them especially interesting, but the broken world of Gears of War very much is. Besides the fact that it takes place on a version of Earth in which it sometimes rains glass, the entire conflict being contextualized as a result of this post-fascist dystopia in which the majority of people are in active opposition to the ruling class is pretty unique.
Harmonix made some interesting choices with Guitar Hero II that would reverberate through both this series and, later, Rock Band. Whereas Guitar Hero assembled a diverse list of tracks from a wide variety of genres, it also featured tracks which virtually anyone could enjoy regardless. Songs from bands that might otherwise be unfriendly to those who dislike the genre or artist were usually crossover hits; "Infected" by Bad Religion, "Ziggy Stardust" by Bowie, "You've Got Another Thing Coming" by Judas Priest. By comparison, Guitar Hero II's track selection is more esoteric; there's just no way you choose to licesnse "Psychobilly Freakout," a Butthole Surfers track or, hell, even a song as politically charged as Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" if you're concerned about mass audience inclusivity. Guitar Hero was such a cultural phenomenon that it didn't matter. Moreso than the first game, Guitar Hero II reintroduced bands like Rush, Danzig and Iggy Pop into the cultural conversation of a younger audience. Part of the reason older and weirder popular bands were so easily accepted by the player base is thanks to Guitar Hero II's game design. Guitar Hero, from the top down, was about recreating the fantasy of conquering the world with your wild guitar skills, which you accomplished by nailing the guitar parts of a bunch of crowd pleasers. Guitar Hero II's fantasy is a bit more specific: it's about being a guitar solo master. A, uh, Riff Lord if you will. Hammer-ons and pull-offs, where you can play notes without strumming so long as you hit the previous note, was a tertiary mechanic in the original game, and demanded pinpoint accuracy. Guitar Hero II both utilizes hammer-ons and pull-offs more heavily and widens the timing window with which they can be used, to steer more players into relying on them. Guitar Hero II's fantasy, then, isn't just to become a "guitar hero." It's the fantasy of becoming the guy at the Guitar Center who spits out the solo from Crazy Train over in the corner while everyone else farts out Wonderwall. Weirder tracks slot in pretty nicely with that fantasy so long as the pace is up and they're difficult to pull off. In fact, Guitar Hero II doubles down on the spectacle of the expert Guitar Hero player by design, capitalizing on the notion that some people were fans of the game as a kind of spectator sport. And this is the divergent point for rock music games: they all get divided between Guitar Hero II-likes and Guitar Hero-likes. Rock Band, for its part, *deeply* widened the variety of genres and the potential for music consumption in the genre, whereas Guitar Hero III would famously triple-down on the notion of the rock music game as Guitar Center Spectator Sport experience.
Despite its cute exterior, Viva Pinata is one of the most manic managerial sims in video games. Unlike Sim City, Civilization, Tropico or Evil Genius, Viva Pinata forces the player into the management of an inherently cannibalistic system. You force creatures to breed, build up a surplus of those, and offer some of them up as prey for bigger creatures, who are more valuable and therefore more desirable. Meanwhile, parasitic creatures can and will destroy the various houses and supplies you build, while also consuming other creatures they can get their hands on. Unlike traditional farming sims, Viva Pinata happens *so fast.* It's a harrowing version of an already complicated style of game - honestly, a more *disturbing* version of a style of game - yet, deceptively, it's the cutest management sim on the market. Very, very strange.
Back in the arcade days, there used to be a ton of games about simple premises like this. The promise of Microsoft's "Xbox Arcade" idea was that downloadable games would naturally gravitate towards this simple, high-concept-y style of budget game due to the inherent limits of the Microsoft store (both technological and arbitrary on Microsoft's part). Obviously, this was a short-sighted plan, as it only took a few years before basically everything was purchasable online. I think the core premise of Xbox Live Arcade produced some interesting titles though: besides a host of rereleased arcade titles, it produced games like Zuma, Boom Boom Rocket, etc. If Geometry Wars is the platonic ideal of the mid-aughts Xbox Live Arcade title, then I'd say Marble Blast Ultra is just one step below it. It's the kind of game you might think; a puzzle platformer (emphasis on the platformer) in which you play as a marble. The devs of this game were really clever, emphasizing a sense of speed and unusual manipulation of gravity. Weirdly enough, of all the games that aren't backwards compatible on Xbox One, this might be the one I miss the most.