Without doubt 2008 will be a year long remembered in MMO circles. New MMOs launched, new MMOs flopped, numerous planned and existing MMOs died. It certainly wasn't a boring year for MMOs - a big change from 2007 - and revealed to anyone who cared to look that the MMO audience today isn't following the same rules they did in the past. It isn't "build it and they will come" anymore, it's "build it and they will come for the first 30 days and then god help you if you aren't up to scratch", meaning the MMO industry right now is kind of like a version of Field of Dreams where Kevin Costner's farmer goes bankrupt and has to sell the farm because he'd cleared valuable cropping land and built an expensive baseball diamond following a whimsical voice when he should have just harvested corn. Or maybe that's stretching an analogy.

Regardless, let's look at the "highlights" of MMOs across 2008, month by month.

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Let's talk about Persona 4. It's a game that I've been anticipating with excitement since I first heard of its announcement, and that is a rare thing because any gamer that follows release announcements knows that anticipation is so often the kiss of death for fun. I'm happy to report that Persona 4 did not disappoint and that I have been playing it with a fervor that no Japanese RPG has left me with for quite some time.

It's like Pikmin, but better.  No annoying time limits, and instead of faceless plant dudes you're controlling funny gobliny things.  It's sort of RPG-ish in that there's a story line with quests, and upgrades for your character as well as for your mob of minions.  Combat is fun -- most of the time you just point at the thing you want dead, you click, and your horde of goblins goes to jump on it and beat it with clubs.  If the things they killed drop weapons or armor, they automatically take them and equip them to increase their own stats, and if there's treasure, the goblins automatically bring it back to you with a gleeful cry of "for Master!"  It's very satisfying and very low on micromanagement.

I discovered this game via the free demo in the Steam store a while back.  Initially held off on buying it at$40, but when it hit $10 this past weekend I couldn't say no.  Now that I've gotten to play more of it, I wish I'd bought it earlier at $40 so I'd have more time for L4D now.

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Buy it.

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I've been playing Mirror's Edge for about 2 or 3 hours now, so I figure I could give it a mini-review.

The Good
- Cityscape is beautiful
- Soundtrack, when played, fits the game perfectly. Has an open air feel to it.

The Bad
- There's not enough good about this game
- Combat is clumsy and almost impossible to manage which would be a problem if...
- They didn't force you to fight in 3 - 1 or 5 - 1 battles.
- Mastery of the moves is necessary otherwise...
- Lack of fluidity in the game because sometimes thinking on the fly isn't possible
- What I've come to call load-kill. Loading at key points can really break up the pacing and kill the intensity of a chase
- Elevators. Did you hate Mass Effect's Elevators? Even Stormwaltz could make fun of Mirror's Edge elevators.
- Hidden QTEs. Remember disarming in training? It's a masked QTE necessary for certain "scenes" in the game.
- Too much time spent inside buildings, sewers and tunnels. Layouts are bland.
- Some things thrown in just to make you use the moves.

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http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html

Have you ever watched a toddler take those first few halting, tottering steps before faceplanting into the carpet and thought 'Ha ha, what a doofus!  Walking is easy.  You are so dumb, baby'.  Well now the joke's on you, you insensitive prick.  Imagine having a button for each major muscle in your legs and having to press them with the correct timing to walk.  Now imagine that instead of just walking, you're having to run a 100 meter dash with a long jump at the end at the Olympics.  Well, you just imagined QWOP.

QWOP is more toy than game, but so was SimCity, and that did well.  You will inevitably break your avatard's neck 20 or 30 times before you figure out how to even take that first step.  Then you will do so 100 more times before figuring out how to make that first 10 meters.

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I have not played any of the other DS CV's but I have played the GBA ones and this is a significant step up. Rather than using the one giant castle design yet again this game provides distinct levels, allowing for a lot of variety and outdoor areas. It still maintains some feel of exploration but in bite-sized chunks. More action and less backtracking.

I really enjoy the different weapons in this game and the way that you obtain new weapons by absorbing glyphs. Different enemies require different weapons but because you can rotate between three active sets there isn't a lot of futzing around in menus. For the most part the proper set of 3 weapons is more than enough for a given level.

If you like 2D action/adventure games this is an absolute no brainer. One of the most fun games I've played this year.

Verdict: Buy it.

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Well, this should be a simple BiiF.
It's more of the same, but a ltitle better looking and a little crazier. New side missions with only 6 levels of each instead of 8 and the addition of motorcycles are nice. There doesn't seem to be a talk radio station anymore unfortunately. Lots of fun though. Online players are still 90% gangsta-wannabe mouthbreathers.

I'd sum it up this way.



Since I answered yes to the first two questions, my answer is Buy It.

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So yeah, the Penny Arcade game. I bought the first episode when it came out and it was basically everything I thought it would be; an incredibly shallow but playable game driven by the writing of Jerry Holkins (Tycho) and the art of Mike Krahulik (Gabe).

Episode 2 is um, more of that + the ever pointless addition of higher difficulty modes and achievements. Whoopie.

Basically take Super Mario RPG and swap the turned based system for a Final Fantasy style real time system. Tada, that's it. Mini-game button pressing events for special attacks, timed blocks, simple combat. The combat is still boring to say the very least. You find out what your enemies are weak against, be it team-attacks, basic attacks, special attacks, or a weapon type, then you use that until they're all dead. If you're really itching to get it over with you can use some of your never ending supply of buff/debuff/attack items to speed things up.

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Joe (you know, the guy from Waterthread and uhhh, f13) made an RPG with Shannon Drake. Just in time for election day, I say! Yes, I'm pimping it. Having heard about it years ago (hell, having read some of it years ago), I'm surprised they actually finished it. Everything beyond the link here is from the man of the hour. No, I don't mean Obama. I mean Joe. Who really isn't the man of the hour... he's just a guy who actually finished something he started.

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As a long-time fan of the classic Fallout games, my first impression of Bethesda's baby was: what butt-vomit did I just pay for?  It felt clunky, buggy and way too similar to a game that starts with 'O' and ends in "fuckyourself."  Yet soon after I stopped sleeping regularly. And I stopped caring about whether it was or was not truly Fallout.

Yes, this is Oblivion done right.  With guns.  Less fat, tastes great.  If you enjoyed TES4 for what it was, then you will enjoy this game at least twice as much because it has exploding baby carriages and 4000% more needless decapitation™.  VATS is truly awesome--take the work out of Max Payne's bullet time, add some (mostly) well-done random camera work and turn up the number of bloody jawbones flying around.

Bethesda has wrung every last drop of beautiful out of my computer, even shaking off the gross little hairs underneath.

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The Hinterland sales pitch is many a PC RPG fan's wet dream.  Take your isometric action RPG and mix it in with a city-builder.  Anno 1503 meets Diablo.  Sacred meets Cleopatra.  Majesty meets. . uh, Majesty, except you control the guys.  Gameplay consists of running out to the wilderness to kill foozles and gather gold, returning to town to spend the gold on new building and upgrades, rinsing, and repeating.   NPCs can be swapped back and forth between the adventuring party and their town function, though there's little point in taking your farmers and innkeepers out to get slaughtered.  Your party will generally be town guards plus a cloth-wearer or two. 

Unfortunately, the novelty and the buzz from the hybrid gameplay wears off fairly quickly.  It's a little unexpected in an indie game.

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Been looking forward to this one for a while now.  That Warren Ellis worked on the backstory, and his Fell collaborator Ben Templesmith did the art for the comics (watch the somewhat animated versions on gametrailers.com) only increased my enthusiasm.  Add to that the DVD release of Dead Space: Downfall (which I likely won't be picking up), and it's obvious that EA's ambitions for Dead Space go far beyond just games.  Of course if the game itself ended up being shit, none of those plans would matter.  So, having played a couple hours of the game so far, how do I feel the game itself stacks up?

The first thing that caught my attention was how effective the complete lack of an HUD feels.  Getting rid of all the clutter on screen really does a lot to help the atmosphere, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Bioshock 2 copy some of Dead Space's ideas in this regard.

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Submitted by Ingmar.

So, I played through the demo 5-6 times this weekend at Blizzcon. For those of you who are wondering if Diablo 3 is in the spirit of the prior 2 games, you can stop worrying; the answer is a resounding yes, in 84 point blinking red caps with a MIDI hallelujah playing in the background. The core gameplay of clicking on a ridiciulous number of monsters to blow them up for a ridiculous number of fancy items is completely intact. If that's all you needed to know you can go back to cutting yourself while you wait, because I don't expect the game, as fun and polished as the part we saw was, to be on sale til probably 2010.

A few important points:

- The game is fucking gorgeous. Complaints about the lack of darkness are unfounded; the dungeon we were able to play through was plenty dark. I would say in fact that had it been much darker it would have been annoying to play.

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It's something of a tradition here at F13 for us to sit down with Raph Koster of Areae.net at least once a year and accost him with all manner of exotically-themed questions. This year is no different; while we weren't able to meet up at the recent Austin Game Developers Conference, we did manage to get a few minutes of Raph's time before he jetted off to London.

Not as good as 2, about as good as 3, better than 4 or 5. The graphics are 8-bit Mega Man and on the Wii they look crisp even on a 40" HDTV - I stopped registering the 8-bitness after the first 5 minutes. The music is pleasant but so far I've yet to encounter a tune that compares to 2 or 3. The bosses are not as lame as the later 8-bit games that introduced luminaries such as Mop Man and Lint Man.

This is a hard game and flirts with borderline cheap but never crosses the line. Every level has one or two hard parts with the rest being no big deal, and levels are very short once you can get through them without dying repeatedly. Being sent back to the start or midpoint isn't bad when it's a 30 second trek back and it cultivates a strong "I'll try just one more time" feeling. And you can always grind for items to make your life easier if you fail at Mega Man games.

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