2008 is one of those years where all of the big games hit much differently today than they did at the the time.
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There was a period in Rockstar Games' history in which they were producing an endless stream of unconventional, daring, even experimental titles. Manhunt, The Warriors, Midnight Club 3, Bully; all of these games featured either an unconventional premise or experimental core mechanic which would be replicated by other developers in the coming years. Manhunt's meta-narrative framing of violent fantasy would be echoed in Hotline Miami, Midnight Club 3 laid a framework for Burnout: Paradise and Forza: Horizons' open world format; even Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' commitment to an epic-scale simulation of urban and rural day-to-day life is echoed in the open world design of Assassin's Creed: Origins. Grand Theft Auto IV is the end of an era, demarcating the last time Rockstar would find itself on the cutting edge. Later Rockstar titles would focus on singular filmic narratives set in digital spaces of unprecedented scale. Grand Theft Auto IV, by contrast, is the rare Rockstar game that actually *limited* the size and scope of its world, favoring specificity and character instead of an expansive video game feature set. GTA IV's Liberty City is a locale built to encapsulate a specific outsider view of American dysfunction. It's an open world that is, itself, parodic and critical. It's neither the photo-realistic simulation of San Andreas' Los Angeles nor the broad caricature of Vice City. Liberty City makes a lot of sense when viewed through the eyes of Nico Bellic, GTA IV's protagonist. Nico is a rare Rockstar lead in that he's not exactly nihilistic or coming from a place of imagined superiority. Nico is critical of his environment, but he ends up forming meaningful bonds with people, as well. He cares about those around him, asks critical questions about their circumstances and the systems which put them there. This is why GTA IV will always be the best of the series, for my money: it's the one Grand Theft Auto game that actually wants you to care.
Persona 4 is widely beloved, and for good reason: it's got a dynamic cast of characters, a compelling central mystery, a phenomenal light-psychological horror framing device for its dungeons, perfected JRPG mechanics, the list goes on. But it also does something important that the other Persona games are less interested in: it allows you to role play through the platonic ideal of the high school experience. Persona 4's lead character is in the enviable position of being the new kid from the big city, and his peers are interested in him by default. Unlike Persona 3's lovably mope-y hero, Persona 4's protagonist is confident, fashionable and widely liked. The end effect is that Persona 4 presents the player with a whimsical, Tokimeki Memorial-like ideation of high school. Whereas Persona 1-3 painted a tense, nominally dark picture of adolescence, Persona 4 encourages you to play through high school as a kind of vacation getaway. Imagine if you could do it all again, but this time, do it perfectly; be a straight-A student with six girlfriends and, like, four part-time jobs. Save for the fact that Persona 4 is a murder mystery, I can't imagine a more fantastical high school experience. But still, it isn't all fantasy. Part of Persona 4's genius is that underneath that idyllic trip back to high school lies a seedy, sort of para-psychological underbelly of greed, repression and judgement. The player is tasked with unmasking and resolving underlying tensions which haunt his friends and, in turn, the town itself. In that way, Persona 4 gets you to think critically about the veneer of small town living. Are the underlying problems of society really different in a rural context? Obviously, no; those problems are just expressed differently. For all its escapist maximalism, Persona 4's strength is its nuanced characters, whose problems are complicated and specific.
The most blindsided I've ever been with a video game. Far Cry 2's commitment to its central thesis is implausible as a AAA game with a budget, a devastating piece of narrative art in a series otherwise famous for being exactly the opposite. While the sheer quality of its narrative delivery can be questionable, especially regarding the bizarre speedreading-style performances of its cast, the overarching theme of cruelty and man-made disaster is spelled out in each and every firefight. Far Cry 2 isn't *fun*, exactly; arguably, it's unpleasant to play. But that unpleasantness is the point. By the game's end, I had gone from traipsing through blazing fires and the chaos of war-time violence in the way I would in any video game to suddenly actualizing that my mastery of the game's mechanics had turned the game into a defacto war crime simulator. The best players in this game about war will have become the worst characters in the narrative. Far Cry 2 doesn't achieve this ambitious reversal of FPS tropes via a blunt-force 'pulling back the curtains' trick, but by introducing several dynamic elements to the game's structure that throttle the player's ability to fully control any given situation. You don't win or lose, per se, so much as you directly and indirectly accumulate material means to the detriment of every single other actor (and natural element) in the game world. This is a game where your enemies will try to save one another when you hurt them. This is a game where killing a 'buddy' may be kinder than trying to save them. You set fires in Far Cry 2, but once you do you can't put them out - you can only fuel the them higher.
Since its release, a lot of Fallout fans have pointed to Fallout 3 as the beginning of the series' downward trend towards the XP driven shooter, but I like to see it as the high watermark of Bethesda's open world role playing. This game lacks the style and clearheaded perspective of its progenitors, but I have never played a game so eager to let you roleplay than Fallout 3. The player isn't given a series of big, plot-altering crossroads as in New Vegas so much as they're given thousands of little moments to decide what kind of person they are. In one early game scene the player is confronted by their childhood bully, Butch, who threatens to steal a birthday gift. You have several options: concede the gift, punch Butch, threaten to punch Butch, make fun of Butch, make fun of the elderly woman who gave you the gift therefore *siding* with Butch, or take the high road and walk away. None of these options have any concrete gameplay effects - I think you can sway your position on the morality scale slightly - but they're there for a reason. Roleplaying a character shouldn't always be about flipping a switch that either saves or ruins the world; at its best, roleplaying means inhabiting a life other than your own. That can mean punching out your schoolyard bully, but it can also mean deciding to be someone who doesn't fit so neatly into monomythian heroics. On my first big playthrough of Fallout 3, I liked being the hero, but I decided I needed to have a flaw to make things interesting. I chose to play as a Witcher-y mercenary with ethics, the kind of person who would do the right thing, but especially for the right price. One sidequest has you rescue an altruistic mercenary group led by a ex-mercenary named Reilly from an unwinnable conflict. When you do, their leader thanks you for the help. There are several responses available, and I chose to haggle for a better price. Reilly smiled, and told me I reminded her of her days as a mercenary for hire. That moment of legitimization lit a spark in me that very few other games ever have. Plenty of games allow you to try out different careers or personalities, but precious few are interested in the specifics.
No More Heroes is a rebuke on the games industry and the people who love it. It's a game that straight out doesn't like you. The main character, Travis Touchdown, uses a non-copyright infringing lightsaber called a beam katana that requires the player to literally jerk off their wii remote to keep it charged. The game's missions are separated by a full open city to explore that has nothing in it save for a few scattered collectibles you receive no reward for attaining. One level is a mostly empty hallway that leads to an enormous robot boss, which explodes before you get to fight it. At the game's climax a surprise character appears to deliver a brutal plot twist. Before she reveals the nature of the game's plot, she suggests video game players are too impatient to listen to dialogue, and so the scene plays at a speed that makes dialogue indiscernible. No More Heroes isn't as shocking now as it was then, but I think the heart of its criticism holds water. I don't think it's quite as bad now as it was then considering Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that demands you take baths regularly, is the most recent megahit in video games, but there are a LOT of developers that put rewarding the player as an objective that supersedes everything.
What sets Gears 2 apart from games like Uncharted, Tomb Raider or Call of Duty is that its set-piece moments never supersede its gameplay. Even when you're waist deep in the stomach acid of a skyscraper-chomping mega worm, you're still zipping between cover spots in challenging combat scenarios. There's no 'hold the analog stick forward and watch the rollercoaster ride' moment. Gears of War 2 is all meat, no vegetables. Also, is there a more 'this is video games in 2008' moment than the sequence with Dom's wife? There's really not.
Dead Space holds up phenomenally well in 2019, but it feels different now. I've become accustomed to games like Outlast or Alien: Isolation from big budget horror, which actually have you on the backpedal. Dead Space may have felt carefully paced at the time, but now it's hard to ignore that you are CONSTANTLY under siege in this game. There's no quiet moment, or breathing room. Shit's popping off all the time and you are always firing wildly into a mass of eject-able limbs. That's not to say Dead Space lacks for existential dread. The moment in which you realize the rescue ship you've been waiting for is about to crash land into you is still gut-to-the-floor horrifying. It's a sequence in which the push-and-pull nature of Dead Space is made explicit: the harder you try to survive the flying limbpocalypse, the harder the world tries to kill you.
People in the video game industry were hungry for legitimization in the late 2000's. You couldn't read a blog post or, uh, share a link to a webcomic in 2008 without running facefirst into a debate about what the "Citizen Kane" of video games was. It was an earnest time, and I do not miss it at all. There's a lot beneath this hilariously antiquated conversation. For one, people who grew up alongside video games were now in their thirties, and likely craving legitimization. The indie scene was also beginning to erupt, and developers were making games that simply could not be critiqued purely on the merit of their 'fun factor.' It wasn't all faux-capital C waxing philosophic, however - this was also when serious attempts at censuring the industry at large by governments around the world. It's easy to forget, but there was a full-on moral panic about Grand Theft Auto for basically a full decade. As a result, there were a lot of writers hungry to namedrop something that proved, once and for all, that video games were art and therefore deserved to be considered as such. Many games were cited as examples of a 'Citizen Kane,' the most frequent of which were (usually) Shadow of the Colossus, Grand Theft Auto IV, BioShock, Half Life 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Of these games, the one I am the least convinced by is Guns of the Patriots. Whereas the other titles on this list explored previously untold narrative territory or created a spectacular sense of atmosphere, Guns of the Patriots is essentially Metal Gear Solid 2/3, but MORE. I say this more as a compliment than a critique, but this is a video game with some serious baggage. Guns of the Patriots, even bound by the core mechanics of a series entering old age, was open enough in design to allow for greater freedom in player expressivity than any previous MGS title. However, it also devoted easily double the time to dry, convoluted exposition as even the famously cutscene-happy MGS 2. I actually like extended cutscenes, but there are sequences in Guns of the Patriots in which the player is asked to sit through strings of cutscenes that equal the length of a feature film. Video games have a unique capacity for interactivity, and Guns of the Patriots' insistence that the player take a backseat for many of its most important moments almost feels like an acknowledgement that movies are just better vehicles for narratives, at least in this context. When you're *in* Guns of the Patriots, it sweeps you off your feet. The boss fights are incredible, and the first two levels, in which Snake must sneak between warring factions he has no allegiances to or against, are so, so good. But then it all gets caught up in itself, and suddenly you're watching a cutscene in which two people confess their love for one another as they're being shot by slow-mo Matrix bullets over and over. Guns of the Patriots is just as Michael Bay as it is Apocalypse Now. My point is, Guns of the Patriots is actually a fantastic game, but its not one that I find myself returning to as some marker of industry progress in the way that I do some other titles on this list. I'm thankful, at the very least, that we've all shed the Citizen Kane question from the conversation.
I'm of the mind that Brendon Chung is one of the most important voices in Video Game storytelling of the last ten years, and Gravity Bone is a testament to his unique style. It's not flat out flawless like Thirty Flights of Loving is, but it possesses the same pixie stick energy, and that ending is just about perfect.
Condemned: Criminal Origins is one of my favorite games of all time, and definitely ranks in the top 10 spookiest games ever. Bloodshot is by contrast more action-oriented, and more willing to go for big moments over the slow burn of building tension. I still love it. Not every swing is a hit, but there are missions in this game in which you just kinda have to throw your hands up and go with it. At one point you're investigating a murder at a history museum, and then a bunch of maniacs break in and start a riot, so you're grabbing medieval swords and slashing guys and, like, screaming on your couch. I'm here for that! And the fuckin BEAR! Ahhhhh what a game. This is a good game.