Dan's End of 2014 Awards - Part Four

It’s the fourth day of my End of 2014 Awards, a five-part blog series wherein I honour the most memorable games I’ve played this year by presenting them with awards whose names rival their very concepts in terms of ridiculousness and stupidity. Just in case you missed them, here are some helpful handy links to Part One, Part Two and Part Three. In this penultimate instalment I’ll be handing out another pair of awards to a couple of great games that I played at some point in the last twelve months. Read on to find out what they are, and what I’m praising them for.

Come Together Award for Best Multiplayer Experience

Halo: Reach (X360 – Bungie – 2010)

I’ve never been one for multiplayer in first-person shooters. Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag don’t really scratch my competitive itch, and I’ve always been much more drawn to the single-player campaigns in games like the Halo series. So when my friend Duncan suggested we play some Halo: Reach together earlier this year, you can probably understand why I was quick to try and make my excuses in an attempt to get out of it. Those excuses quickly turned to acceptance, though, when I realised it wasn’t competitive multiplayer he was proposing, but co-operative multiplayer – a shared journey through Halo: Reach’s campaign, where we’d be working together to survive, rather than against each other in some point-scoring exercise.

It took us about half a dozen sessions of play across two weeks to see the credits roll on Reach, a campaign so blisteringly good that revisiting it has cemented it as one of my favourite first-person shooters ever. During that time I noticed my play-style shift from selfish and reckless to being much more considered and aware of my team-mate’s situation. We learned how to play to each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses. When we became stuck we’d talk tactics, after which we’d invariably come out on the other side of whatever skirmish had been holding us back. What makes it even more special is that we didn’t do this sitting on the same sofa, but with a distance of hundreds of miles between us, our camaraderie transcending the obstacle of distance as well as the in-game challenges before us. It was a phenomenal gaming experience - one that I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to partake in, and one that I won’t soon forget.

Since wrapping up our tenure on Reach, we’ve played through Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (a much less fun experience due to persistent technical gremlins delaying our journey) and at the time of writing we have made it a fair way through the original Borderlands (which I’m sure would be earning this award if we’d been able to finish it before the year was out). In 2015 we plan to postpone our adventures on Pandora, sidelining Borderlands 2 in order to return to the Halo universe for co-op run-throughs of ODST, 3 and 4. That should keep us pretty busy through until the summer. I’m just stoked to have a good friend that I can play these games co-operatively with, and I hope we’ll be teaming up for a long time to come.

Bridge Burning Award for Best Next-Generation Game on a Current Generation Console

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PS3 – Kojima Productions – 2014)

(I’m fully aware that my use of ‘next-generation’ and ‘current generation’ for this award isn’t in line with that of most people. To put it simply, I’ve decided to refer to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as ‘current generation’ consoles here because I own them, and to call the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 ‘next-generation’ hardware because I don’t own either of them yet. I hope that clears up any confusion.)

2014 saw a lot of games straddling the inter-generational gap, with versions coming out on both old and new hardware. Being one of those people yet to make the brave leap forward onto a new console, this strange state of affairs has left me in two minds about whether to pick up a lot of games this year. There’s a niggling worry at the back of my mind that by picking up the Xbox 360 or PS3 version of these games, I’m somehow buying into a vastly inferior product, and that I should be holding out to experience them on the newer hardware when I finally make the jump to an Xbox One or PS4. Consequently, I’ve held off from picking up a lot of this year’s biggest releases in favour of waiting until I can experience them as the developers intended on a next-generation machine.

The one game that I did buy and play on less powerful hardware this year was the PlayStation 3 version of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. I didn’t intend to initially, for the reasons outlined above, but I found the urge too great to ignore after seeing it heavily discounted on the PlayStation Store back in August and snapped up a digital copy of Hideo Kojima’s latest. And do you know what? I’m really glad I did. Sure, the textures aren’t as high-fidelity as its next-gen counterparts. The frame rate gets pretty choppy in spots, particularly during the in-engine cut-scenes. But once I took control of Big Boss and started exploring the island facility in front of me, none of that mattered. Not a bit.

What the PS3 version of Ground Zeroes does is make good on its promise of delivering a next-generation gameplay experience on current generation hardware. In fairness, a great deal of that is probably down to the enhancements inherent in Ground Zeroes’ core gameplay, which is a huge leap forward from everything the Metal Gear series has done before. The refined stealth mechanics and the introduction of an open world encourage a more emergent and organic approach to the series’ hallmark tactical espionage action. Because of this, it felt like I was playing something that was a marked step up from what I was used to, without needing any physical hardware upgrade to make it possible. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is due next year, and while I’m hoping to have a PlayStation 4 to play it on by then, it’s good to know that I won’t be getting a majorly stripped-down version should I opt to play it on PS3 instead.

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Eight awards have been presented, and only two remain. Which games will earn this last pair of coveted gongs? Come back tomorrow to find out. Thanks for reading folks, take care, and I’ll see you around.

Dan

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Currently playing - Pokémon Omega Ruby (3DS)