Top 5's and Rejects
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Games: Just wrapped up GC’s GOTY coverage this evening. Took a little longer than I thought, but since it's only January 3, we are actually way ahead of our own curve.
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Instead of doing a standard top ten for the entire site, we have five critics (including myself) each giving their own top-five. We debated the pros and cons of doing individual lists as opposed to one aggregate, but for a year like 2008 that had so many quality titles for so many different tastes, the opportunity to call out more than ten seems to be the best way to go. One other reason was that so many of the aggregate top tens seem so similar that we felt a little more diversity calling out the wide range of offerings would be a more accurate representation of what we were all playing. Look for it to go live soon.
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Games: Now that the holiday rush is over (thank God!) it's time to play catch-up with everything that I missed… it's been a little of this and a little of that, and I've been kicking out more titles that I've been keeping.
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For example, Power Up Forever (available on XBLA/PSN) seemed good in the first five minutes, but quickly lost its appeal due to some clunky controls and shallow design.
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NinjaBee is one of my favorite developers, but their Boingz (WiiWare) was a serious disappointment.
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The biggest surprise downer for me so far was Insomniac’s Resistance: Fall of Man.
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I've been holding onto this one for while, and with #2 appearing on some top ten lists, I figured it was time to give it a whirl. I never would have expected it, but I found the game to be completely personality-free and extremely dull to play. I didn't finish the game, but from what I saw (about half, according to FAQs) the environments were drab and uninspired, the Chimera enemies made no sense, and none of the weapons I came across felt special in any way -- probably the biggest surprise from the people who created Ratchet & Clank. I'm glad I picked it up for cheap, and I think I'll be crossing Resistance 2 off my to-play list, as well.
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Oh well... I've still got quite a list to get to.
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The first Resistance game didn't impress me all that much, and I haven't even bothered to try the single player for this one at all. Despite that, the multiplayer is actually really fun and engaging, which surprised me as multiplayer FPS games don't usually do it for me.